George Bernard Shaw at the Pound

George Bernard Shaw made his own blinders.

There is a general tendency for those on the political left to assume eugenics is an expression of right-wing fanaticism.  In fact, eugenics is an apolitical idea and it was embraced by such diverse names as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Konrad Lorenz, Oliver Wendell Homes, Margaret Sanger, Luther Burbank, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Leland Stanford, and H. G. Wells, among others. 

To say there was widespread support for eugenics in the first few decades before and after the turn of the 20th Century is not to say there were not some controversies!

Hitler, for example, was bent on sterilizing and killing Jews, but many opposed this plan, not because they were against forced sterilization or state-sponsored murder, but because they thought the Jews were absolutely the wrong group.  A lot of Jews were smart and industrious!  Keep them!   The folks you wanted to round up to sterilize kill were the lazy, the crazy, the "unfit", and the old, sick and broken.

And who pushed this school of thought?  One vocal advocate was none other than liberal Fabian George Bernard Shaw, author of both Pygmalion and Man and Superman fame, and winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature.







What most people do not know about G. B. Shaw is that he was not only a writer, but also an economist who was a co-founder of the London School of Economics. 

Shaw was also a vocal proponent of eugenics.  At the back of Man and Superman, he penned a section on "Good Breeding" and "Property and Marriage" where he synthesized and homogenized a new form of eugenic socialism in which he advocated all production as being put forward for the collective good.

Shaw was in the thick of the eugenics movement, and a leading thinker and vocal advocate.  At a meeting of the Eugenic Education Society on March 3, 1910, Shaw suggested the need to create  a "lethal chamber" to solve "the problem" of poor producers dragging down society, and he also called for the creation of a "deadly" but "humane" gas for the purpose of killing many "unfit" people at a time.  Sound familiar? 

This kind of talk was not idle chatter or ironic polemicism or satire -- sterilization and gas chambers were put forth by Shaw as very serious "solutions" to the "quality of people" problem and were seen as the inevitable way forward by many others.

Where did this idea come from? 

Why from the animal breeders of course, and the dog breeders in particular.  To this day, sterilization, gas chambers and closed canine breeding pools are the back bone of the Kennel Club systems in the U.S., the U.K., and around the world.

Which is not to say that the Kennel Club invented all this.  The push to "improve" animals through selective breeding at the hand of man can be traced back to Robert Bakewell and earlier.

No less a luminary than Charles Darwin noted that with humans, the healing hand of natural selection was being interfered with by medicine and social institutions that protected the weak, and it was thought that not much good could come from that!   As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1882):

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies 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. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Of course, this was all pseudo-science to justify social position, and to monumentalize the selfish desire to avoid taxation to help the poor. Why spend money feeding and housing poor people (or abandoned dogs) when for less than the price of a bullet, you could "humanely" gas them wholesale?

Today, of course, to note that the Kennel Club and the eugenics movement spring from common roots and were self-reinforcing, is a heresy. Simple history is omitted, redacted or swept under the rug. As author Micheal Crichton has noted:

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all.

Right. The Kennel Club practice eugenics with sterilization, gas chambers, and closed breeding pools? Well yes, but that's not eugenics -- that's dog breeding! 

As for George Bernard Shaw, many of his supporters have attempted to suggest his support for eugenics was a kind of Irish irony, along the lines of Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal.  Perhaps.  There is no question Shaw was a kind of linguistic Lady Gaga, willing to say anything to get attention and in love with his own voice and self-fanning fame.  That said, Shaw did attend meetings of the Eugenic Education society, did praise Adolph Hitler, and did it all without too much irony being in self-evidence. 

• Related Links:
  ** Inbred Thinking
  ** The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club
  ** From Bassetts to Auschwitz in 50 Years
  ** The Francis Galton Dog Show
  ** A Fear of Foreign Blood
  ** Stonehenge:  The Roots of the Inbreeding Problem
  ** On Eugenics and Dogs, Circa 1942
  ** Gas Chambers, Dog Breeders and "Shelters" .

.