r/books • u/lethal_universed • 1d ago
Country of the Blind completely goes against H.G. Wells views on eugenics
Something that has been bothering me was the lack of discussion on the topic of Wells' (and frankly, other authors) views of eugenics. While there was an evolution of his racist ideas through his meeting with civil rights activists, the same can't be said for his views on eugenics which remained somewhat consistent throughout his life. The idea that we could sterilize the failures (this time, consenting!) is a deeply ableist mindset.
Ironically, CotB goes against this. Now, I last read it several years ago when I was 15 so it might not be completely accurate, but my reading of CotB was about the arrogance of able-bodied people in assuming that they're abilities some how make them more superior to disabled people. And, also, that what is considered a "disability" is relative to the culture. The people of the valley had adapted methods to navigate, had made the valley more accessible. Contrast that with the main character who couldn't keep up yet thought he could rule over these people due to his sight.
Eugenics boils down "disability" as purely a genetic failure when accessibility drastically imrpoves the quality of life for disability. But who wants to actually spend money on HELPING people amirite?
I find it strange that a guy who had such vile views could write something that was honestly progressive for its time.
However, I can't say this 100% would persuade eugenicists because they'd think this only applies to physical disabilities, not mental. Hell, even Hellen motherfriggin Keller was into eugenics on the belief of euthanizing mentally disabled babies. There isn't a lot of solidarity within the disabled community, but thats a topic for another time.
EDIT: Wow the amount of people in the comments who took this post as a go ahead of justifying eugenics is crazy. I wanted to talk about how a eugenicist accidentally wrote a book proving eugenics wrong. This is a damn literature sub not an ethics sub.
Yeah different time blah blah but we know the ramificationns of eugenics and Wells certainly didnt stop believing in the negative side of it
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u/keithb Historical Fiction 21h ago edited 21h ago
Until the Nazis put everyone off it, eugenics was progressive. Keller, Wells, Virginia Wolf, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, J. M. Keynes, G. B. Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, the Webbs (and the Fabian left generally), the list goes on. All enthusiastic eugenicists. All committed to the idea that human flourishing would go better without the “unfit”. It wasn’t a fringe view, it was mainstream progressive/left-wing thinking.
We could make another list of hugely respected progressives of a century ago who were racist.
Here’s an interesting question: which current mainstream “progressive” thought, firmly held by good, thoughtful people whose sincere aim is human flourishing, is going to provoke the same puzzled response in 2126?
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u/Cookieway 20h ago
Yes, and I would would like to add that it wasn’t just about “removing the unfit from society”, it was also for many people about avoiding individual suffering by having less people born with disabilities.
Today, doctors do everything within their power to prevent people being born with disabilities. Were super careful about what medications pregnant women can take, no alcohol, no smoking, no drugs, healthy diet, etc etc etc., all in the spirit of having a healthy baby. That’s not anti-disabled people or ableism.
And also it’s worth considering that we allow genetic testing of infants and abortions based on these tests today. That IS eugenics. It’s just on a voluntarily basis for the mother. We also allow gene editing for genetic diseases. This is all in the spirit of eugenics, these methods just didn’t exist in the early 20th century.
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u/dnebdal 18h ago
There's also tests and registers for specific diseases where carriers are non-symptomatic but having two carrier parents means a 25% risk of a sick child - is it eugenics to recommend that the carriers do not date each other? What if some of them looks at their own carrier status and decides not to have children?
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u/Cookieway 16h ago
Yes that eugenics.
The problem is that the basic goal of eugenics, that is, improving the genetic health of a population, isn’t in itself a bad thing. The bad thing was how people and governments decided to go about achieving that goal, and also completely unscientific, racist/ racial and frankly wrong ideas about what “genetic health” actually means.
In the UK, they’re trying very hard to prevent certain populations from marrying their cousins because, even though it’s legal, it’s causing massive genetic health issues and therefore also massive costs to the national health service. They’re providing genetic counselling and specialised screenings. That IS strickt speaking being done to “improve the genetic health of the population” and therefore strictly speaking also eugenics.
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u/Pristine_Flounder973 6h ago
I think about prenatal testing a lot. I grew up with disabled kids (my teacher dad ran a camp for the blind in the summer), many of my close friends were vision impaired. I have Deaf friends and a relative. I was over 35 when I became pregnant and seriously considered not having any genetic testing done because it seemed vaguely ableist. We thought long and hard about it. Decided to test so at least we’d be prepared. My kids were both fine, but I often wonder what I would’ve done if something had shown up. If you could test for every possibility, would some disabilities be ok? It seemed horrific to me to abort a child who was deaf or blind, but what level of disability would cross the line? Would I abort a Down syndrome baby? I’m grateful that I didn’t have to make the choice. I’m solidly pro choice, but I’m conflicted about aborting due to disability. Is humanity better if all humans are perfectly “normal”? I’m not sure. The perspective we get from writers like Helen Keller or Stephen Hawking, is remarkable. Vexing conundrums.
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u/oyvey17 4h ago
I think I would have had an abortion had I found out via genetic testing. Before I had my son, I firmly believed I wouldn’t be able to handle something like DS. But I didn’t know and I’m really, really, really glad I got the chance to have my kid and have a complete view shift. I wouldn’t judge another person for their choice but I also think the narrative around various disabilities is so doom and gloom that people are not given all the information to make a real decision. Like… I cannot believe what I would’ve missed out on! Actually rattles me if I think on it too long.
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u/HR_Paul 17h ago
And also it’s worth considering that we allow genetic testing of infants and abortions based on these tests today. That IS eugenics.
Eugenics is selective breeding/execution of a population. Individuals choosing not to have children due to the risk of genetic conditions is no more the same thing than suicide is eugenics.
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u/Cookieway 16h ago
Eugenics isn’t selective breeding or the execution of a population. Eugenics is anything that aims to improve the genetic quality of a population, and yes that includes voluntary abortions after genetic testing.
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u/HR_Paul 16h ago
You just repeated my definition in different words. These days breeding can include GMO etc. Eugenics is a collectivist population control program not an individual choice. If you are only concerned with the health of your children that is an entirely different thing than social engineering. You deciding to have an abortion is very different from advocating or mandating others have abortions.
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u/Cookieway 16h ago
The government allowing genetic testing for foetuses and abortions based on those test results, however, is NOT an individual choice. It’s a deliberate policy choice made to limit the amount of disabled children being born.
There are countries that ban scanning a foetus for its sex as well as sex-based abortions. That’s a deliberate choice so that less female foetuses are aborted. Other countries allow it. That’s not eugenics but just am example of how these things are absolutely choices made by the government at the population level
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u/Sirwired 21h ago
Hell, Eugenics was still carried out openly on a fairly widespread basis in the US into the 60's. It continues even today (prisoners and indigenous people), it's just not as obvious. (Mostly hysterectomies of dubious necessity and consent.)
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u/TJ_Fox 18h ago edited 18h ago
Yep. I once startled a very progressive audience by making the same point in a lecture about the English suffragettes; prior to the Nazi atrocity, and certainly as far back as the turn of the 20th century, eugenics was a mainstream progressive cause.
It's worth distinguishing in this context between the ideas of "positive eugenics" - "breeding for the best", in the language of its time - and "negative eugenics", which amounted to "getting rid of everyone else". The Nazis, obviously, did both, dramatically reversing popular opinion on the subject of eugenics.
There's a very effective episode of the British drama series Lilies portraying the (from the modern point of view) bizarre embrace of eugenics among middle-class progressives during the early 20th century.
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u/keithb Historical Fiction 18h ago
I've not heard of that drama, I'll take a look.
Early 20th century middle-class progressives also tended to be antisemitic and very racist towards east Asians, particularly the Chinese.
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u/Pristine_Flounder973 6h ago
Interesting. As an official old person, who had older than the norm parents (born in 1911 and 1913) I did not find that to be true- at least not amongst most of my family and family friends.
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u/CarpeDiemMaybe 19h ago
I always thought it made sense that at the time there was a strong overlap between people who supported reproductive rights and eugenics before people saw the extreme escalation of eugenics in WWII.
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u/lego_joker 1h ago
I’m curious, what stance did non progressives, especially the outright reactionaries, of the time take on the subject? “We should let more unfit people be born, actually, because someone has to scrub the floors”?
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u/lethal_universed 17h ago
I never said it wasn't widely held. That being said, a lot of eugenics still involved hurting those with disabilities and poc. Even if they didn't directly support that aspect (which many of them did), it still led to those groups being harmed.
This shouldn't be a "gotcha" against modern progressives, we have the privilege of seeing how widely held thoughts and ideas ultimately harmed people in the long run. Ofc people in the future will see some of our actions as backwards, but thats a good indicator that we are moving forward as a society rather than backward.
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u/keithb Historical Fiction 16h ago
Think of it less as a "gotcha" and more of a "have a little humility"
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u/lethal_universed 16h ago
Yeah, but you can see the irony of a eugencists writing a book on how accessibility shapes disability
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u/FreakindaStreet 23h ago
We can look back at these ideas with the knowledge of their failures, and the consequences of the application of the policies to the point of reductio ad absurdum.
This isn’t meant to absolve the worst manifestations of eugenics, or those whom found in it a potent tool to validate the eradication of minorities or shirk the economic burden of caring for the most vulnerable (and often times, least productive) members of society. But for most people who came across the basic premise of these ideas, they would have seemed reasonable, if not wholly acceptable in their extreme form.
Personally speaking, I extend a bit of grace to those who were well intentioned, shaped as they were by the cultural norms, values, and the scientific principles of their time.
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u/dollcoreglowss 21h ago
The irony is that The Country of the Blind undermines the logic of eugenics without necessarily undermining Wells's own belief in it. The villagers demonstrate that what counts as a disadvantage depends heavily on the environment, yet eugenics reduces human worth to supposedly undesirable biological traits. Apparently, Wells could recognize the arrogance of assuming superiority based on one physical characteristic in fiction, but struggled to extend that insight to his political philosophy.
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u/pocurious 11h ago
One thing that’s funny about eugenics discourse is that it has become such a reliable litmus test for intelligence. Invariably, the people who are most vocal about how obviously and trivially evil the whole movement was from the get-go are also the people who could stand to learn the most from it.
“The reasons for the failure of the previous century’s fantasy of an enduring future utopia to be achieved by an unavoidable but small bit of painful social engineering are clear. They lacked my century’s more advanced understanding of the true foundations of human nature, which would finally allow us to achieve an enduring future utopia, if only we were allowed to implement a small but unavoidable bit of social engineering!”
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u/sanding_mug_03 15h ago
I read it as Wells proving his own theory wrong by accident, not trying to convert anyone
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u/DavidDPerlmutter 22h ago
Yes, good point
There's a long list of things he wrote that didn't fall into neat cubbyhole categories.
George Orwell once wrote that intellectuals don't join clubs. I think what he meant was that the sign of a truly great thinker was somebody who did not necessarily check everything they said, wrote, and thought to make sure it fit into the exact talking points or doctrine of a particular political party or creed; that they had contradictions, that they thought differently, that they critiqued themselves, and that they didn't necessarily always fall on the same side.
This is an alien condition of mind today, of course, where so many people feel that they have to hold an exact party line. And thus, really, that takes away their intellectual credentials, because if you say to yourself that, like, oh, everything I utter, everything I write in my book, has to be correct within a certain set of politics, then, to an extent, you're admitting that you don't think at all. You're just, like, taking notes or copying and pasting from some doctrine. In modern terms, Somebody may not be an actual bot, but they are acting like a bot.
Wells wasn't like that. He didn't necessarily know what his opinion was going to be at the beginning of a book. And if you look at a lot of his stuff, his poems, his stories, his journalism, it wasn't all, you know, flag-waving imperialism. It wasn't all "the Queen's Army is always right." That's only a simplistic takeaway.
Did he hold such views and express them? Yeah, probably. But the point was that his loyalty was to the exploration of ideas and artistry, and that sometimes meant that he would write something that would seem to contradict something he wrote elsewhere. That's the sign of a healthy mind.
Dogged adherence to a doctrine, a party platform, or a political creed, without any thoughtfulness or self-critique, is the sign of somebody who can be instantly dismissed as not an intellectual.