Galton: The Fall

The ideas of inheritance and the measurement of intelligence were exciting and fascinating new ways of looking at the world.  However, Galton took this knowledge and ran too far with it.  Before the measuring of intelligence through sensory acuity, the differences between successful and non-successful people were chalked up to character– as Darwin said, “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect only in zeal and hard work.”  It must have been amazing to imagine that people were so much more than their character- that perhaps there were uncontrollable inheritances that pre-determined one’s behavior or success in life.  While these new ideas opened up a whole realm of possibilities in the discovery of truth and for scientific thought, it also brought about some dangerous conclusions on how to deal with man’s inherited differences .  Such an empirical way of viewing man lead to an inappropriate desire to control and enhance him.  Galton’s conclusion was eugenics– a type of breeding in order to improve society.  As he said, “I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature…I conclude that each generation has enormous power … and maintain that it is a duty we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that , without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth.”  Galton suggested that the government pay for couples who have desirable characteristics to be married.  I classify this view of man under the fall because in it, man and society become the sum of their empirical parts.  When this idea was fleshed out with full conviction, it was known as the Holocaust.  Racial cleansing, infanticide, and prejudice are all fallen outcomes of this purely scientific view of man.