Tantalus

by F. C. S. Schiller

This prognostication would be very plausible, if we supposed eugenics to be introduced into the social structure from above, privily, and in small doses, and by way of administrative order, as under the existing Acts to check the spread of feeble-mindedness.

But this method would be impracticable. It would not generate anything like the social momentum necessary to carry through any radical reform. To make it effective, it would have to be backed by a powerful, enthusiastic, and intelligent public sentiment. This presupposes that the public has been biologically educated to appreciate the actual situation, and has been thoroughly wrought up about the fatuity of our social order, and understands what is wrong with it. If it understands that much, it can also be made to see that it is fantastic to expect to leap to the Ideal State by a social revolution. No one now knows what the institutions of an Ideal State would be like, nor how they would work. We only know that they will have to be evolved out of our present institutions, even as the Superman has to be evolved out of the primitive Yahoo. In either case, the process will be gradual, and its success will depend upon details, on taking one step after another at the right rate in the right direction, making a new adjustment here, overcoming an old difficulty there, removing obstacles, smoothing over the shell-holes and scars dating from Man’s lurid past, and, in general, feeling one’s way systematically and scientifically to better things. Such a mode of progression may seem unheroic, but it has the great advantage that it is unlikely to go irretrievably wrong. If we know from the outset that we are tentatively feeling our way, we shall always be on the look out for traps and possibilities of going astray, trying out the value of our policies by their results, and willing to retrace our steps when we have made a false one.

The social temper, therefore, will become far more intelligent and reasonable than it has been hitherto. It will be slow to dogmatize, and will regard the toleration of differences of opinion as among the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. For as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, that perfection may be postulated, provision has always to be made for the improvement of the social order. It can never be accepted as absolutely good, but must always be regarded as capable, in principle, of being bettered. Even the best of established institutions are only good relatively to the alternatives to which they showed themselves superior: under changed conditions they may become inferior, and may fail us, or ruin us, if we do not make haste to transform them into something better fitted to the new conditions. Hence the social order must be plastic, and must never be allowed to grow rigid. There must always be room in it for experiments that have a reasonable prospect of turning out to be improvements. For progress will depend on the timely adoption of such novelties.

But society has no means of commanding them at will. It has to wait till they occur to some one. As biological variations have to arise spontaneously before they can be selected, so valuable new ideas have to occur in a human mind before they can be tried and approved. Society cannot originate discoveries, it can only refrain from so organizing itself as to stamp them out when they occur. It is vitally necessary, therefore, that we should beware of suppressing variations, whether of thought or of bodily endowment, that may prove to be valuable.

Also, of course, we shall have to realize that our whole procedure is essentially experimental, and all that this implies. We do not know, at the outset, what would be the best obtainable type, either of man or of society; true, but we mean to find out. Nor is it unreasonable to expect to do so as we go along. We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are undesirable, and that no good can come of coddling and cultivating them: we similarly are pretty sure that certain other types, say the intelligent, healthy, and energetic, are inherently superior to the former. We try, therefore, to improve and increase the better types. How precisely, and how most effectively we do not quite know, though we can make pretty good preliminary guesses. So we try. That will entail experimentation in a variety of directions, with ‘control experiments,’ and a modicum of mistakes. But our mistakes will not be fatal, because if we advance tentatively and with intelligent apprehension, we shall realize them in time, and shall not feel bound to persist in any course that yields unsatisfactory results.

It is really one of the great advantages of eugenics that it cannot proceed upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but will have to be guided by the results of experiment and the fruits of experience, each of which will be followed and discussed by an intensely interested public. For the difficulties of eugenics are all difficulties of detail, and intelligent attention to detail may overcome them all. Thus the dysgenical working of civilized society, which has come about unintentionally through the unfortunate convergence of a number of tendencies, may be altered similarly, by changing the incidence of social forces.

IX

If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and the progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve further—in whatever direction seems to him best. We need not take alarm at this possibility, for with his superior knowledge he may surely be trusted to make a better job of his evolution than the Lemur and the Pithecanthropus, who were our progenitors and managed to evolve into modern man.

But the process will necessarily be a slow one, even though a comprehensive scheme of eugenics will be providing simultaneously two sources of improvement, by the elimination of defectives at the bottom of the social scale, and by the increase of ability at the top. As, moreover, time presses, and sheer destruction may overtake us before eugenics have made much difference, it would be highly desirable if some means could be found to accelerate the change of heart required. For this purpose, I am much less inclined to put my trust in the advance of pharmacology than Mr Haldane and Mr Russell.[D] Hitherto new drugs have only meant new vices, sometimes (like cocaine) of so fascinating a character as to distract the whole police force from their proper function of repressing crime. So it seems legitimate to be very sceptical about moral transformation scenes to be wrought by pills and injections.

On the other hand there does seem to be a science from the possible progress of which something of a sensational kind might not unreasonably be expected. It is, moreover, the science most directly concerned with affairs of this sort. Psychology, the science of human mentality, is, by common consent, in a deplorably backward state. It has remained a ground for metaphysical excursions and a playground for the arbitrary pedantries of classificatory systematists. Its efforts to become scientific have only led it to ape assumptions and to borrow notions found to be appropriate in sciences with widely different problems and objects. The results, as the psychologists themselves confess, are meagre and disappointing; which, of course, only proves that the borrowed notions are inappropriate and incapable of making Psychology into an effective science. But if psychologists should take it into their heads to settle down to business, to recognize the primary obligation of every science to develop methods and conceptions capable of working upon its subject-matter, and so tried to authenticate their ‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of the other sciences, namely by the pragmatic test of successful working, some surprising effects might be elicited even from the actual human mind.