Author Information
Social Hygiene
Sigmund Freud is a household name synonymous with sexual liberation while the name of Havelock Ellis is barely known, yet Havelock Ellis along with several liberal lady friends led the popular mode of the sexual liberation that bloomed in the Sixties and is still being fought out today, particularly in the abortion arena. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), a physican and author, challenged Victorian tabus. He fostered open discussion of sexuality in order to dissipate fear and ignorance of the subject. He believed that sex is an expression of love and therefore is good. He championed women's rights and sex education. A judge called his book, The Criminal (1880) "a pretence, adapted for the purpose of selling a filthy publication." His Man and Woman (1894) also broke tabus, but Ellis is best known for Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928), an encylopedia on sexual biology and attitudes, including frank discussions of homosexuality and masturbation.
Female suffragists with the help of their male sympathizers won their cause in Britain and America in the early 20th century. Many of them had associated with the peace and labor movement, but most women sold out to get the vote, and pitched in to win the Great War. As it turned out, the fear that women would vote liberal if given the vote was unfounded: women were as conservative and perhaps even more so than men. Nonetheless, quite a few women were not only tired of producing and raising as many children as their mates happened to bestow on them, they were even more aggrieved that their hard labor was to no avail - sons and daugthers were being ground up in factories; to make matters worse, their sons were serving as cannon meat.
Pacific feminists took up abortion as a means to control the growth of the population, which was tending to 'Malthusian' poverty and neglect during the early phase of the industrial-scientific revolution. Men had been freed, to starve when no work was available, and women were increasingly competing with them for jobs. Unable to find work, some men went home and killled their families to put them out of harm's way. If only women had power over the most important production factory, their own bodies, they might in theory be able to reduce the need to fight over land and other means of production, not to mention the means of bare subsistence. In fine, abortion was viewed by some as a hygienic restraint on the ultimate production facility, the womb, that population growth might be controlled, among other things.
Certain postmodern feminists, perhaps fearing that a male might get undue credit for female revolution, have claimed that dissident women simply latched onto Havelock Ellis to take advantage of his male status and scientific credentials to capitalize their cause. Ellis loved women straight and gay, and they loved him back. It is hard to say who took the greatest advantage of whom.
Havelock Ellis discussed eugenics in his dynamic book, The Dance of Life (1923). The concept is as old as agriculture, but the notion of scientifically cultivating a superior human species was the rage at the turn of the century, and was developed along several paths including the outrageous road to the ovens. He broached the subject in while describing Jules Gaultier's philosophy of Bovarysme. Bovarism is derived from a study of Gustave Flaubert's novel, Madame Bovary - Emma Bovary was a fictitious creature whom no man could possibly satisfy yet she was bound to pursue one after another all the same. Emma was, for Gaultier, a pathological case of the human need to become something more than what one presently is; a need for progress necessarily fulfilled by resort to those "illusions" that might be realized under the right conditions given the right effort. In sum, Gaultier's philosophy was a modern, dynamic idealism that repudiated static idols such as Truth. Fixed truths were anti-life as far as Gaultier was concerned, for life must go on, not stand still in death.
Revolutionary scientific and technological advances provided humankind with powerful means to cultivate nature's laws and to modify his circumstances in order to realize his material ideals, yet not much has improved in the invisible sphere. The philosophers sing a broader variety of songs with the same themes. The scientific and technological revolution seemed to make utopia possible for all people, not just for the elite. Communism or some other form of socialism, it seemed, might be possible for the entire human race instead of progress being limited to small groups. The means of production would obviously have to be in the right hands to obtain utopia: the hands of the producers. Woman were certainly entitled to have their production facilities under control; of course those men who thought of women as so much soil, and themselves as the farmers who owned that soil, disagreed.
No doubt there would be plenty of everything to share in an uncrowded utopia. But would material prosperity ensure peace? Ellis and almost every other intellectual doubted it given the reality of man's history, a history of greed and one war after another even in the midst of plenty; some say plenty causes war, because the leisure of prosperity bores humans and makes men especially anxious for violent excitement. For instance, the average German was not rich before the Great War, but he was certainly relatively well off in comparison to his predecessors, and was getting better under Germany's unprecedented prosperity - a bourgeois, effeminate prosperity that disgusted aristocratic-minded intellectuals.
Havelock Ellis, Jules Gaultier, Bertrand Russell and many others believed that man's greed for things and his lust for women - his possessive instinct - could be diverted to aesthetic pursuits: the production and appreciate of works of art. Instead of fighting for the possession of a limited number of things, people could lead an aesthetic life and appreciate representations or impressions of those things, or enjoy beautiful abstractions and the like. Great public works of art -monuments, museums, parks, et cetera - belong to the commune.
We observe in an aside that children were raised by the community in Plato's utopia - we might claim that children are art works in process, and that public education is an aesthetic endeavor. We might also imagine a free-love society where love is an art promiscuously pursued by people freed of the burden of involuntary childbearing and from inefficient child-raising by their parents, a society where mates and children are not possessed as private property.
Ellis quoted the philosopher Santayana: "Everything is a work of art in a thoroughly humanized society."
Another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote Ellis, found two impulses in humankind: a creative impulse, which tends to save man; a possessive impulse, which destroys him. To keep a thing to oneself is to deprive others and even oneself of its enjoyment.
The imaginary life itself rather than belief in idols should serve to restrain the possessive impulse by deflecting and keeping it, via sublimation, in a sort of dream-world where energy is dissipated in the creation of un-reality. Religions and moralities are counter-productive because they invoke menacing images in an attempt to gratify the possessive instinct by enslaving imagination to an alien power. For instance, obey god and get rich, disobey god and lose everything. On the other hand, we might suppose that the aesthete constantly creates his god, never arrives at the eternity beyond time and space; that is to say, Nothing.
"Those who promote life," remarked Russell, "do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal."
Such an aesthetic life would take the pressure off women to produce wage slaves and cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex, provided women were willing to cooperate in the beautification project. Ellis pointed out that the aesthetic instinct is related to morality, and that the aesthetic instinct has been around as long as the egoistic instinct. He opines, I think mistakenly, that the aesthetic instinct, unlike the possessive instinct, engenders neither hatred or obedience; it does not,he claims, compel obedience or inculcate prohibitions. The art-for-art's sake artist does not mix with the crowd and push points of view: he picks out something and reveals the truth of it.
Alas, Havelock Ellis looks around and sees an obstacle to the realization of an beautiful utopia: art and morality are rapidly degenerating. Civilized life has brought about excessive industrialism and materialization, and with it the demoralization of men and corresponding decay of their aesthetic sensibility. Why, if Sun and Moon were within their reach, predators would steal and destroy them. Witness for example beautiful public places such as parks and churches: they must be closed because of the depredations of a "predatory minority."
"The liberty of the whole community in its finest manisfestations is abridged by a handful of imbeciles...." complained Ellis.
What can be done to save our ideal, beautiful world?
In a word, Eugenics.
Ellis quotes Francis Galton: "It is incumbent upon us to eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the unnatural conditions which society in the past had established. That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring and these diseased stocks and in the interests of society. No power in Heaven or Earth can ever confer upon us the right to create the unfit in order to hang them like millstones around the necks of the fit." Furthermore, the humanitarians who ruled the 19th century were "anxious to perpetuate and multiply all the worst spawn of humanity."
Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin's cousin and the founder of modern eugenics, was an anti-Christian evolutionist. He studied medicine but did not practice. Galton coined the world 'eugenics,' and believed it expressed a Greek notion: the basis for his concept of eugenics, which he defined as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally."
Eugenics, Galton insisted, should be studied in school, practiced as a political policy, and "must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion." Galton pioneered new statistical methods, including correlated calculus, and made ample use of the"bell curve." He sometimes took his science of "biometrics" to ridiculous lengths: in Africa he walked around a large-breasted woman and measured her angles with a sextant. He was fond of rating girls for beauty on a scale of one to ten, charting the results.
Galton outlined his views on eugenics in 'Hereditary Character and Talent', an article appearing in MacMillan's Magazine in November of 1864 and April 1865.
"If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle," he said, "what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties..... The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised.... We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old.... No one, I think, can doubt, from the facts and analogies I have brought forward, that, if talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves, generation after generation, we might produce a highly-bred human race, with no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown by our long-established breeds of race-horses and fox-hounds."
Ellis admits that he has diverged from Gaultier's illusionism, for Gaultier's aesthetic solutions to the vulgarities were more democratic and middle-class: wages should be increased so that the vulgar would have more leisure to elevate themselves to the aesthetic life - of course leisure energy must be mandated to that end.
Ellis also quoted the statement of zoologist A. M. Carr-Saunders (1866-1966), that all people practiced eugenics, via abortion, infanticide, and abstinence, to select and maintain the best stocks of people. Carr-Saunders, who influenced Friedrich A. Hayek's theory of cultural evolution, had authored a popular book, The Population Problem, in 1922. "Human evolution," stated Carr-Saunders, "is nothing more than a process of sifting, and where that sifting ceases evolution ceases, becomes, indeed, revolution." Apparently evolution should be helped along or all hell will break loose, just as the inevitable classless state of the communists should be helped along .
Ellis further bolstered his argument in favor of eugenics with references to the sayings of Jesus the Christ. For example: "The path to salvation is narrow." "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." And, "Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost its savour.... it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and be trodden under foot of men."
We might suppose, after taking certain portions of scripture out of spiritual context, that Christianity was an aristocratic religion or a communist religion - take your pick. As for the abortion debate, Jesus allegedly was a Jew, and we know from sources other than scripture that the Jews frowned on abortion and infanticide. Notwithstanding religious laws, particularly the prohibition against harming a child in the womb, it behooved the tribes to go forth and multiply given their warlike behavior. Romans, who practiced abortion and infanticide, ridiculed the "immorality" of the Jews for not doing the same. Still, Ellis rightly identifies the principle of selection if not the right practice of the principle.
Ellis suggests that civilization might resort to cities of refuge to save the better portion of humanity; that suburban path is now being followed by those who can afford it - perhaps the highway to utopia might be broadened somewhat by socialists.... Not just any withdrawal from the vulgar world will do, certainly not the ascetic flight from reality. Ellis mistakenly claims that the withdrawing Cistercians (better known later as the Trappist monks) produced nothing, "mixing not with men nor performing for them so-called useful tasks." The Cistercians were fed up with the corruption of the current monkish order, so they fled to the woods and set up shops nearby or on streams - things could be cleaned on one end of the structure and the other end could be used to flush away waste. The ingenious Cistercians followed the Benedictine rule dignifying manual labor. Their free devotional labor helped produce an economic boom in Europe. A predatory commercial minority moved in and exploited the Cistercians - some became abbots, purchasing the office in order to take over the productive monasteries.
Eugenics leaves us with a hygienic question few clean and comfortably situated people bother to ask because they already have an answer: Who should be weeded out and who should be cultivated?
The answer would depend on the definition of a "good" human being. When someone says, "It is incumbent upon us to eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the unnatural conditions which society in the past had established. That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring and these diseased stocks and in the interests of society," we might think, for example, of privileged people who by virtue of artificial or "unnatural" civilized society have inherited their power and wealth, or who have obtained it unethically, or who have won it not because of their personal merits but by luck of the draw, so to speak. We might even refer to many of them as the "scum on top of society" since the "dregs of society" has already been taken by the predators at the depths.
All that and more might be remedied by inheritance taxes, and other legislation abolishing the legalization of their "good" fortune and their crimes against humanity. If members of a predatory minority are caught hoarding and amassing unearned wealth, they might receive long prison sentences at hard labor, with regular floggings and appropriate periods in the hole, of course. That would be the humane thing to do, especially if such persons are predisposed by nature to be economic and military predators. If the genetic coding is at fault, genetic therapy could be put to good use. Birth control might be mandatory absent voluntary restraint; failing that, abortion might be a necessary adjunct to the selective breeding of good human stocks. However, evidence from recent primate studies suggest that nurture and not nature is the cause of our social ills:
PloSBiology published a study of a temperamental and tonal shift in a troop of 62 baboons after the dominant males, given to fighting with dominant males from another troop over a tourist resort's garbage dump, were killed by bovine tuberculosis contracted from tainted meat. Subordinate males, females, and children left behind did not catch the disease. The social hierarchy relaxed with a cultural swing to pacifism that has lasted twenty years despite the death or disappearance of the pacific males. Male baboons tend to emigrate, hence the pacific males were sometimes replaced by immigrants, who soon gave up their aggressive habits and adopted the peaceful ways of their new community: mutual affection and grooming instead of nasty fighting. (Kansas City Star, April 18, 2004)
The cause of human violence may not be as natural as some people suppose. Another primate study has come in, this one on bonobos found in the Congo. Bonobos are close cousins to humans, with 98% genetic similarity. They enjoy a matriarchical social structure. Eschewing conflict, they do not fight over territory, and resolve their frictions sexually. Sex play begins at the age of one; there is no proprietary mating; homosexuality is au courant. Human beings are destroying them with their wars as well as eating them for dinner. Claudine Andre, who cares for orphaned bonobos in Kinshasa, said of the bonobos, "It's really make love, not war. It was so sad to see such a pacific animal destroyed by war." (New York Times, May 4, 2004)
Galton was right when he said, "The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised...." (sic). Perhaps our educators need to take the recommendation of biologist H.G. Wells to heart, and make sure that education proceeds with biology. Indeed, good grades in biology, anthropology and the like should be necessary to qualify for leadership. Yet it is highly unlikely that the current leaders will make such provisions for mandatory education in the biological fundamentals.
A radical environmentalist has suggested that a 'Great Defenestration' be held to liquidate the predatory minority, proceeding with supervisors of over ten people and working up to the dominant predators on the top floors - since the windows of skyscrapers are usually sealed, defenestration might be impossible, hence the minority could be hurled from the rooftops by the Topping Off Party. Such a course of action, they hope, will lead to another Renaissance of the human spirit, just as humanity was revitalized after the Black Death destroyed the medieval theocracy.
Top-down social-hygiene methodology assumes that the scum should be scraped off the top, first of all, then the dregs at the bottom can be dredged up. But to start at the top might be immoral: political and religious leaders of the Red Scare warned us that it is just as much of a sin to hate rich people as it is to hate poor people. For the sake of scientific progress, perhaps a Teddy Roosevelt of social hygiene could be engaged to restrain the predators at top and bottom at the same time.
