Dangerous/Unfathomable Ideas

Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) posed the incendiary question: ‘Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?’ He coined the term ‘eugenics’ and in 1869 wrote: ‘The time may hereafter arrive, in far distant years, when the population of the earth shall be kept as strictly within the bounds of number and suitability of race, as the sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in an orchard-house; in the meantime, let us do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best fitted to invent and conform to a high and generous civilisation, and not, out of a mistaken instinct of giving support to the weak, prevent the incoming of strong and hearty individuals.’

Heffernan, Margaret. Uncharted: How to Map the Future (p. 96). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

In 1980, a millionaire sunglasses entrepreneur, Robert Graham, opened a Repository for Germinal Choice that called for elite sperm from men of the highest intellect (preferably Nobel laureates) to be inseminated into intelligent, healthy young women. His ‘genius bank’ was widely ridiculed and, before it was disbanded, seems to have produced just fifteen children, none of any distinction.

Heffernan, Margaret. Uncharted: How to Map the Future (p. 98). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

For decades, eugenics attracted a large and distinguished following from all parts of the political spectrum: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Maynard Keynes and H. G. Wells believed that human ‘stock’ should not be diluted by allowing ‘detrimental types’ to have children. Bertrand Russell proposed that the state issue colour-coded ‘pro-creation tickets’ defining who was and was not allowed to bear children. Sterilisation, segregation and incarceration were all proposed as means of eliminating those deemed to be ‘social rubbish’. Writing to Prime Minister Asquith, Winston Churchill warned that ‘The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race. The mother of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator couldn’t have agreed more: ‘Multitudes of people are utterly worthless or worse than worthless, having no just claims whatsoever upon the civilisation which they burden with the dead weight of their existence.’36

Heffernan, Margaret. Uncharted: How to Map the Future (p. 97). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.