Ideas have consequences, and some ideas have consequences their authors never intended. I want to walk you through one paragraph from Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published in 1871, and trace what the twentieth century did with it. The journey runs from chapter five of that book to the United States Supreme Court, and it is shorter than most people imagine.
The Paragraph, and the Lines That Follow It
Here is Darwin, in chapter five, in his own words:
We civilised men… do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick… Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
Read that again slowly. Civilization, Darwin observed, interferes with the elimination of the weak. The weak then reproduce. And anyone familiar with livestock breeding, he said, will see that this must be highly injurious to the human race.
I insist on quoting the next lines as well, and I do so gladly, because fairness demands it. Darwin immediately added that we could not withhold our sympathy without deterioration in “the noblest part of our nature,” and he counseled bearing the burden. He personally endorsed no atrocity. Let that be said clearly, and let it be remembered. I have no interest in making Darwin into a monster he was not.
But ideas are seeds, and this one sprouted inside his own family.
The Cousin Who Planted It
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, read the Origin and described the experience as a conversion. He then founded a movement and gave it a name: eugenics, the managed breeding of human beings, lest the unfit multiply. Where Darwin had described a problem and counseled sympathy, Galton proposed a program.
Darwin did not repudiate him. He did the opposite. In The Descent of Man itself, the same book that contains the paragraph above, Darwin praised Galton’s work.
Three Generations of Imbeciles
Within two generations, the movement wearing Darwin’s vocabulary of fitness and elimination had produced forced sterilization laws across the civilized world. That includes the United States, where tens of thousands of people were sterilized against their will. In 1927, our own Supreme Court upheld the practice in Buck v. Bell, and the opinion contains a sentence that should never be forgotten: “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Pause on that. An observation about asylums in a nineteenth-century scientific text became, within a few decades, a legal justification for the state to decide who may have children.
A Tree and Its Fruit
Was Darwin responsible for everything that was later done in his name? No. No man is. Ideas get twisted by people their authors never met, and it would be unjust to charge Darwin with every crime committed under the banner of fitness.
But the facts in this case are narrower and harder to wave away. His own cousin founded the movement. He founded it citing Darwin. He founded it during Darwin’s lifetime. And Darwin responded with printed praise in his own book. A tree may disown no fruit growing on its own branch.
In my next post I want to go underneath all of this to the question that matters most: why did Darwin believe what he believed? His family censored his answer for seventy years. We have it now, in his own words, and it turns on the word “wish.”
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