Too quick to condemn

It’s right to condemn outmoded values. But condemning eminent historical figures is often banal and opportunistic

JBS Haldane was one of the great biologists of the 20th Century. A scentific polymath, he coined terms such as ‘cloning’ and ‘primordial soup’, proposed invitro fertilisation (IVF) and much more besides. He served as a Black Watch officer during the Great War and was a confirmed anti-fascist and socialist for the rest of his life. During India’s independence from the UK, he declared himself so appalled by the UK’s colonial record that he moved to India and renounced his British citizenship.

Haldane was a eugenicist who wrote that a successful eugenics programme would require: “the removal of race prejudices and of the unscientific doctrine that good or bad genes are the monopoly of particular peoples”.

Today, Haldane is routinely denounced in personal terms as a racist. One MD who self-describes as a bioethicist includes Haldane in a list of early 20th century scholars:

“These white men were a bunch of ableists and racists. And that’s how we got sperm banks”. So much for sperm banks, then.

Another geneticist tweets: “Haldane was a horrible racist”.

Yet the political abuse of science of the day by some German scientists is surely not cause for the personal damnation of all early 20th century geneticists? Haldane, amongst others, was an extraordinary scholar, conscience and human being. His science was conditional, as all science is. That some of his science has been proven wrong is a testament to the power of the scientific method he and others developed. That he was part of the post-war ethical reappraisal of genetics and eugenics, essentially their separation, is beyond question.

Yet condemnation comes readily today to so many; and it behoves us to consider why this is.

Why is it so easy for us all today to see the terrible errors of early 20th century eugenics when it was all but impossible for the best minds of the day to perceive it? It can’t be that we ALL have minds superior to the likes of Haldane.

Consider this simple thought experiment. Until World War 2, genetics and eugenics were interchangeable terms. Imagine you were a scientist born not when you were but instead in 1892, and that Haldane was born in 1992. Do you suppose that early 20th century you would have been the only pure anti-eugenicist in the village, while 21st century Haldane would be a confirmed eugenicist? That sounds absurdly self-aggrandising and seems obvious nonsense. This is because humankind only realised the terrible error of pre-war eugenics through historical experience. The condemnation of Haldane, in other words, rests upon the timing of his birth. And if personal condemnation rests upon luck in this way, it is arbitrary and meaningless.

It is of course right to condemn pre-war eugenics but wrong to condemn pre-war eugenicists like Haldane unless their actions otherwise makes such condemnation worthy. In that latter category we can certainly include literal Nazis like Eugen Fischer and his colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropololgy, who persuaded Hitler to take up their ideological ideas about race hygeine: This was the opposite of Haldane’s powerfully expressed views values and actions.

Moreover, those who condemn Haldane for the timing of his life and views, must by the same terms condemn virtually everyone whose normative views subsequently became or become condemnable ones. Most people alive today are likely to be breaching some future normatively held evil. Eating the baby offspring of animals grown for the purpose? Killing living things on land and at sea for fun and holding up the corpses for cheerful pictures?

This is not to compare eugenics or racism with any other future normative evil, not least because we cannot know what these normatively held evils will be. Nor is it to lay down how we should decide when a thing became normative. It is rather to say that if evils like pre-war eugenics are to be considered timeless, they must be separated from the normative standards of any age; while the personal condemnation of individuals must surely do the opposite? People can only be condemned where they have or had agency, and for this the question of the potential evils of pre-war eugenics had to have arisen. Indeed, when it arose, Haldane and other geneticists condemned it like everyone else.

Why are so many scientists today so quick to jump on the condemnation bandwagon, then? Is it because many of the ethical questions which arose with pre-war eugenics arise today at the vanguard of genetics and some scientists wish to create personal scapegoats to emphasise the distance between modern genetics and pre-war eugenics?

Eugenics is such a powerful pejorative that it would be wrong to present 21st century genetics as eugenics. But this does not alter the ethical challenges one whit and condemning early eugenicists on the basis of their science alone seems a crude and superficial attempt to draw the eye away from phenomenally difficult ethical questions genetics must face today.

The simple fact, however, is surely that geneticists are just as capable as anyone else of defending the merits of scientific progress while engaging with the deep ethical issues which invariably surround such research? Cheap personal condemnation does not help the field of genetics in this; it positively harms.