Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) Part 1
Historical Background
The ‘brave new world’ imagined by Aldous Huxley had its origins in the work of 19th century scientists, including his own grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. T.H. Huxley (1825-1895) was a prominent English biologist and writer who was a strong supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, suggested that man could take charge of his own evolution and improve the human race by arranging marriages through several generations; he called this systematic breeding programme “eugenics.”1
The interest in eugenics received a tremendous boost at the turn of the century, when scientists discovered the pioneering research of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Mendel was a priest in an Augustinian monastery in Austria. He discovered of the principle of heredity and laid the foundation for the science of genetics, but the importance of his work was not recognized until it was confirmed by three European scientists in 1900.2
Galton’s idea, Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the discoveries in genetics combined with the prejudices of the age and spread widely through Europe and the English speaking world. It appears that the new interest in genetics led many to believe that the key to eugenics lay in heredity, not environment. Many influential eugenicists believed that intelligence was an inherited and fixed characteristic that determined whether people would be good citizens or good workers: the higher the intelligence, the better the person. Prominent American scientist H.H. Goddard summed up this viewpoint just after the First World War:
The intelligence controls the emotions and the emotions are controlled in proportion to the degree of intelligence . . . if there is little intelligence the emotions will be uncontrolled and . . . will result in actions that are . . . usually undesirable.3
Democracy means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy.4
It was widely believed that people inherited not only eye and hair colour, but were criminals, or rich, poor, lazy, industrious, promiscuous or faithful because they were ‘born that way.’ That is: there were genes for such behaviour, or genes determined their intelligence, and intelligence determined everything else.5
Defined by the American geneticist Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944) as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding,”6 eugenics was a widely accepted scientific discipline.
By the scientific standards of the time, eugenic research was on the cutting edge of science. Its practitioners were respected scholars from various scientific disciplines who occupied important positions in major universities and published their results in major scholarly journals.7
The theory of eugenics could be implemented in two ways. Selective breeding could produce ‘superior’ human beings, while the birth of ‘inferior types’ could be prevented by contraception and sterilization.
Selective breeding, while theoretically possible, was hardly practical. Human sexual relations were governed not only by natural inclinations, but by religious, moral and social traditions, the most prominent being the institution of marriage. One of Huxley’s characters, Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, suggests that all of this changed because discoveries among “the savages of Samoa” led to social reforms.8 The reference is to a very popular book by Margaret Mead (1901-1978), published in 1928.9 Mead claimed that premarital sexual promiscuity was the norm among the Samoans, very welcome news to prominent people in the 1920’s who wanted to discard moral prohibitions against adultery and extramarital sex.10 Mead’s observations on Samoa were later discredited,11 but the book was still new and very popular when Huxley was writing Brave New World.
While selective breeding was not in the cards in 1932 (at least in England), leading scientists and social activists of the day hoped to prevent the birth of ‘defectives’ by prohibiting the marriage of ‘inferior types’ and by contraception and sterilization. The ‘inferior types’ included the mentally ill, physically handicapped, criminals, and certain races that were believed to be ‘degenerate,’12 often because they were thought to produce large numbers of such ‘inferior’ individuals. Of special concern were the “feeble-minded”, classed as idiots, imbeciles and morons.13 ‘Moron,’ by the way, was a category broad enough to include many ordinary people raised in backward circumstances, or who, like non-English speaking immigrants, were unfamiliar with the culture of the expert assessing their intelligence. Nonetheless, H.H. Goddard offered the following advice in 1914:
If both parents are feeble- minded all the children will be feeble-minded. It is obvious that such matings should not be allowed. It is perfectly clear that no feeble-minded person should ever be allowed to marry or to become a parent It is obvious that if this rule is to be carried out the intelligent part of society must enforce it.14
The American Eugenics Society (established 1905) subscribed to the idea that there were “pure races.” Its founders considered the white race superior, and Nordic whites – what the Nazis called ‘Aryans’ – the best of the white races. Lobbying supported by eugenic societies and scientists resulted in the passage of laws to authorize voluntary or compulsory sterilization of ‘defectives’, including criminals, the mentally handicapped and the mentally ill; 27 US states had such laws in 1931.15 The pressure also led to the National Quota Origins Law of 1924, which severely limited immigration to the United States by ‘inferior races’ from eastern Europe and Mediterranean countries.16 Eugenic societies were also founded in Britain and in Germany. By 1935 there were sterilization laws in Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Norway and Sweden.17
In 1928 H.H. Goddard reconsidered his views about morons and conceded that, with proper education and training, they could function usefully in society. He no longer thought it necessary to prevent them from marrying or reproducing, probably because their moronic children would replace them in the appropriate niches in society.18 Others also began to place greater emphasis on the influence of environment. By the mid-1930’s many scientists had begun to seriously question or repudiate some key eugenic theories.19
Nonetheless, earlier, more radical notions continued to circulate and remained popular in some circles and in some countries until the Second World War, including Canada. Emily Murphy (1868-1933), the first female magistrate in the British Empire, was a famous activist for women’s civil rights, the originator of the court challenge that led to recognition that women were ‘persons’ under the law. In 1932 (the year Brave New World appeared), apparently unaware of Goddard’s retraction, she rendered his 1914 statement almost verbatim: “The science of genetics shows to us that where both the husband and wife are feeble-minded, all the children are feeble-minded.”20
Murphy was writing in praise of the Alberta Sterilization Act as a law that helped the government deal compassionately with “the human wreckage which has been dumped from foreign lands” – a clear reference to the large number of immigrants from eastern Europe who settled the prairies. She noted that surgically sterilizing a male took only about the same time needed to execute “unhappy degenerates” who broke the law because of their hereditary defects.21
The chairman of the Eugenics Board of Alberta from 1929 to 1965 was John M. MacEachran, the founder of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, a scholar with “impeccable” academic qualifications. Speaking in 1932, MacEachran praised the Alberta Sterilization Act because it could be used to sterilize “men and women of defective intelligence or of criminal tendencies.”22
The year after Murphy and MacEachern spoke out, the young Tommy Douglas argued in a thesis that “subnormal” people should not be allowed to reproduce, and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario awarded him a Master of Arts degree in sociology.23 Douglas went on to become a well-known, respected and popular Canadian politician, a premier of Saskatchewan, the first leader of the NDP, and “the father of medicare.”
In England in 1933, the year Hitler took control of Germany, Marie Stopes24 published a book25 that railed against the Catholic prohibition of contraception, which Pope Pius XI had reasserted three years earlier.26 A full chapter of the book was dedicated to “Roman Catholic Defectives and the State.”
The attitude adopted by the Church of Rome about defectives was clearly put by Monsignor Canon Brown, now Bishop Pella, in the Report of the evidence of the National Birth Rate Commission. . . This witness. . . stated explicitly that the State cannot lawfully forbid the marriage of the poor or the physically defective . . . (emphasis in the original)27
. . .There is, however, considerable feeling, even on the part of the Roman Catholics, that the production of the feeble-minded and moral defectives who are becoming an increasing burden on the state, should in some way or another be controlled. . . 28
. . . At present in the over-populated districts of the cities, the slum-dwellers who produce long chains of defective C3 children are generally either themselves mentally defective or are Roman Catholics. . .29
Quoting statistics from Scotland and elsewhere, Stopes asserted that Catholics were absorbing national resources “at the expense of thrifty, self-respecting Protestants whom they are definitely and in many instances consciously ‘breeding out’ of existence, and on whom they batten as a parasite battens upon its host.”30
Aldous Huxley’s older brother, Julian, (1887-1975) was among those who provided prefatory notes to Stopes’ book. Julian was a philosopher, author and a biologist who made a special study of embryology. He later became the first director-general of UNESCO. Julian commended Stopes:
Dr. Stopes has done a real service in writing this book. Grave questions are involved and she has brought them out of the fog of veiled allusion and circumlocution in which they have been wrapped . . . A number of important facts concerning the Roman Catholic position on birth control are here set down, amply documented . . .31
Aldous Huxley not only witnessed the surge of interest in eugenics and social engineering in the first decades of the twentieth century, but grew up in a family in which these and related subjects would have been continually discussed. Brave New World appeared when the social and political tides favouring eugenics were still in full flood.
Notes
1. Lifton, Robert Jay, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986, p. 24
2. L.C. Dunn, John Ramsbottom, “Gregor Johan Mendel,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1973) Vol. 15:146
3. Goddard, H.H., Psychology of the Normal and Subnormal. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1919, p. 272. Quoted in Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 161
4. Goddard, H.H., Psychology of the Normal and Subnormal. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1919, p. 237. Quoted in Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 161.
5. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 160-162
6. Freidlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 4
7. Freidlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 7
8. Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950, p. 44
9. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
10. Nolan, Patrick. Personal interview. 26 Jan. 2000. (Dept. of Sociology, University of South Carolina). Quoted in Bender, Ann M., Humphries, Trevor, Michael, Trevor, The Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman Debate. (Accessed 2004-11-11)
Famous English mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell condemned Christian sexual morality as “a morbid aberration” that had made Christianity “a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.” Russell, Bertrand, Marriage and Morals (1929). (Accessed 2004-11-11) Three years earlier he had asserted that “prolonged virginity is, as a rule, extraordinarily harmful to women” and described concern about adultery as “quite irrational.” Russell, Bertrand, “What I Believe” (1925), in Edwards, Paul, Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not A Christian. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1982, p. 56-57
11. Mead apparently learned some of the language but was not fluent; her book “was not and is not really used as a reference for research.” Maclachlan, Morgan ( Department of Anthropology,University of South Carolina) Personal interview. 26 Jan. 2000. Quoted in Bender, Humphries & Michael, supra
Anthropologist Derek Freeman lived in Samoa for a time in the 1940’s and was honoured with the title “matai”- head of a family or chief. In 1989 he interviewed two Samoans, one of whom was Mead’s best friend when she was doing her work. They told him that Mead had taken seriously their joking and exaggeration about sexual behaviour, so that her book was incorrect. Bender, Humphries & Michael, supra
12. M.J. Drake, I.W. Mills and D. Cranston, On the Chequered History of Vasectomy BJU International (September 1999), 84.4. (Accessed 2004-10-25)
13. “[I]diots could not develop full speech and had mental ages below three; imbeciles could not master written language and ranged from three to seven in mental age.” Morons were “high grade defectives” with mental ages between eight and twelve. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 158-159.
14. Goddard, H.H., Feeble-mindednes: Its Causes and Consequences. New York, MacMillan, 1914, p. 561. Quoted in Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 163
15. Hippisley Markham, Felix Morris, “Eugenics,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1973) Vol. 8:815
16. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 232. Also referred to as the Johnson Act and the Immigration Restriction Act
17. Hippisley Markham, Felix Morris, “Eugenics,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1973) Vol. 8:815
18. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 173-174
19. Hippisley Markham, Felix Morris, “Eugenics,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1973) Vol. 8:815
20. Murphy, Emily “Sterilization of the Insane,” The Vancouver Sun. Sep. 1932. (Accessed 2013-05-24)
21. Murphy, Emily “Sterilization of the Insane,” The Vancouver Sun. Sep. 1932. (Accessed 2013-05-24)
22. Robb, Michael, “What’s in a name? Psychology department cuts ties with eugenics proponent.” Folio, 26 September, 1997. (Accessed 2013-05-24)
23. Stewart, Walter, The Life and Times of Tommy Douglas (McArthur and Company) Cited in Jackson, Paul, “Historical Hypocrisy,” Calgary Sun. (Accessed 2004-10-2). Guenther, Bruce L.G., “Populism, Politics and Christianity in Western Canada.” Paper Presented at the Canadian Society of Church History, University of Alberta, May 2000. Revised version published in Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History (2000) 93-112 (Accessed 2013-05-24)
24. Founder of the British birth control movement whose work is continued around the world by Marie Stopes International. (Accessed 2013-05-24)
25. Stopes, Marie Carmichael, Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control. London: Peter Davies, 1933
26. Pius XI, Encyclical Casti Connubii, 31 December, 1930. (Accessed 2013-05-24)
27. Stopes, Marie Carmichael, Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control. London: Peter Davies, 1933, p. 197-198
28. Stopes, Marie Carmichael, Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control. London: Peter Davies, 1933, p. 202
29. Stopes, Marie Carmichael, Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control. London: Peter Davies, 1933, p. 209
30. Stopes, Marie Carmichael, Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control. London: Peter Davies, 1933, p. 206
31. Stopes, Marie Carmichael, Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control. London: Peter Davies, 1933, p. xi
Catholic Ecumene 