Book Commentary: Eugenics and Other Evils
Title: Eugenics and Other Evils
Author: G.K. Chesterton
Interesting Quotes: “So long as Christianity continued the tradition
of patron saints and portable relics, this idea of a blessing on the household could continue. If men had not domestic divinities, at least they had divine domesticities.”
“The obvious thing to protect an ideal is a religion. The obvious thing to protect the ideal of marriage is the Christian religion. And for various reasons, which only a history of England could explain (though it hardly ever does), the working classes of this country have been very much cut off from Christianity. I do not dream of denying, indeed I should take every opportunity of affirming, that monogamy and its domestic responsibilities can be defended on rational apart from religious grounds. But a religion is the practical protection of any moral idea which has to be popular and which has to be pugnacious. And our ideal, if it is to survive, will have to be both.”
Commentary: So far not my favorite of Chesterton’s books, but like all his writings, it still has great quotable material.
Maybe I came to this book with the wrong expectations. I picked it up expecting a general dissection and refutation of eugenics. However, this book is instead tightly situated in its historical context. Chesterton discusses in length the absurdity of the feeble-mindedness law in England — which for him must have been a very important topic, but that at least for me was something I had no real attachment to.
Chesterton, of course, does address the issues of eugenics more generally in many passages, but the book in its entirety is always making constant reference to its age — 19th-20th century industrial capitalist England and the conditions of the poor and rich at the time.
The “Other Evils” from the title are always described from that setting. These are, most prominently, capitalism and socialism. Chesterton pulls no punches in attacking both, and as his antidote, he makes the case for that ideal from the times prior to the Industrial Revolution, where property was widely distributed and there were simple peasants, not ‘proletarians’. So, although the book is not focused on distributism, there is an apology for it in the later chapters.
Overall, interesting to get the historical perspective and read Chesterton’s usual wit, but if I were asked for a single work making the case against eugenics, I would still look further.
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