Poetry

Eugenics and Shakespeare — A Scary Observation Or Silly Overreaction?

Did I just see the wolf behind the Will? His uncomfortable Sonnet 11

Read for yourself, and see if you spot the cause of my anxiety:

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st In one of thine, from that which thou departest; And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st, Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest. Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase; Without this folly, age, and cold decay: If all were minded so, the times should cease And threescore year would make the world away.

Let those whom nature hath not made for store, Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish: Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more; Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish: She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby, Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

My translation:

As fast as you wither, so fast will ‘you’ grow In one of your descendants, as you depart; And the blood of your line which you leave behind You may call your own, when you are no longer young. In that is wisdom, beauty, and increase: Without it, folly, age, and cold decay: If everyone tinks like that, the present age would end And in 60 years the world will go away.

Let those who nature didn’t make eternal - Who are harsh, featureless, and crude - depart without children: But those who she best gifted, Should fully cherish those generous gifts. She printed her seal on you and intended this: That you should make imprints of yourself, and thus preserve the original.

I strongly disagree with Shakespeare’s sentiments in this sonnet. 2 reflections:

1. Eugenics?

If you haven’t spotted it, let me pick it out for you:

Let those whom nature hath not made for store, Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:

While these sonnets were likely written in jest, some things you don’t joke about.

Those who are outwardly and inwardly unattractive, Shakespeare says they don’t need to leave descendants.

Meaning, to his friend, you should have a child. (Again, we know the young man is who Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to: “To The Only Begetter of These Ensuing Sonnets. Mr. W. H.” Reference.)

Maybe there is an argument for saying, if someone’s in a bad state, that’s not the time to have a child.

But it doesn’t mean person’s somehow inferior. In times to come they may be able to also bring up children well, thank you very much.

His thought, if pushed to the logical conclusion, is eugenics.

It’s the idea that a society can select desirable characteristics in its gene pool to improve future generations.

But this involves the removal of certain groups of people.

Francis Galton, British scientist, was the first person to use the term. He proposed a system of arranged marriages between certain male and females to produce a gifted race.

This reminds me of a poem by Rudyard Kipling:

“NOW this is the law of the jungle, As old and as true as the sky, And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, But the wolf that shall break it must die.

An outworking of Darwin’s natural selection, but in the social sphere.

The validity and credibility of eugenics were largely debunked after the second world war.

On this, I quote Keller, an author I introduced in a prior article. He comments on Juergen Habermas’s change of attitude in recent years:

Habermas tells those who are still confident that “philosophical reason … is capable of determining what is true and false” to simply look at the “catastrophes of the twentieth century — religious fascist and communist states, operating on the basis of practical reason — to see that this confidence is misplaced.”

He cites the following evidence for Habermas’s thesis:

Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton University shows that a century ago progressive, science-based social policies were broadly understood to entail the sterilization or internment of those persons deemed to have defective genes.

And:

In 1926 John T. Scopes was famously tried under Tennessee law for teaching evolution.

Few people remember, however, that the textbook Scopes used, Civic Biology by George Hunter, taught not only evolution but also argued that science dictated we should sterilize or even kill those classes of people who weakened the human gene pool by spreading “disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country.”

Scary.

2. Basis for equality

Instead, the basis of equality is a heritage of Christianity, which Shakespeare should’ve been familiar:

The Greek worldview rested “entirely on the conviction that there exists a natural hierarchy. … Some men are born to command, others to obey.”

Keller continues:

But “in direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity — an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

He even quotes Horkheimer, a secularist philosopher espousing Critical Theory (i.e. cultural marxism):

Max Horkheimer writes that, while Greek thought gave us a partial idea of a limited democracy only for the highborn and educated, the biblical idea of “God’s creation of man in his own image and Christ’s atonement for all mankind” strengthened the Western idea of the value of the individual “immeasurably.”

Even a secularist would say that about Christianity.

The fact Shakespeare keeps writing to tell his friend to have a child makes me wonder whether I should laugh or cry.

But his slight bent on eugenics also makes me wonder how I should respond to the sonnet.

References

Keller, Timothy. Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical. John Murray Press, 2016.

Leonard, Thomas C. Illberal Reformers: Race Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton University Press 2016.

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