The Sabisky Affair

Eugenics is in the news again, following the departure of the hitherto-unknown Andrew Sabisky from the fever-basement of Number 10. Though this looks like a victory for the bien-pensants, it's worth noting in passing that the Prime Minister clearly sees no reason to apologise, let alone purge his chief advisor who supposedly employed the "weirdo". I suspect all this has done is further lower the bar for "acceptable opinion". Eugenics is an odd topic in public discourse because there is a tendency to avoid actually spelling out what it means, either in theory or practice. You might protest that we already hear far too much on the subject, and that there is no lack of pseudo-intellectual justifications or madcap schemes, not to mention thorough debunkings informed by both science and moral philosophy, but I think a lot of this is just meaningless theatre that neither gets to the heart of the eugenicist case nor adequately explains why eugenicism is both objectionable and pernicious.

The philosophical basis of eugenics is essentialism: the idea that qualities are biologically intrinsic. What follows from this is a belief that function follows form: that certain types of person are more suited to particular purposes and roles. In the pre-modern world, where social relations were largely unchanging, rank was believed to reflect virtue. In the modern world, "breeding" has been replaced by talent as the expression of intrinsic value and the arbiter of rank in a notional meritocracy, but in reality we have barely left the old forms of thought behind, merely translated them from an aristocratic to a democratic vocabulary. This, as much as the Boer War, is why the 1900s saw so much concern over the calibre of the "national stock" in tandem with the debate over universal suffrage. What did change over the course of the twentieth century was the language of eugenic advocacy, with a shift away from the metaphorical farmyard to the abstract of the good society in phrases such as a "healthy people".

Making an essentialist claim in respect of race or class is clearly offensive, and easily disproven, but the truth is that polite society is tacitly supportive of the idea in its wider application. It consciously rejects racism and bigotry, but it subsconciously divides society into the better and the worse. This obsession with rank frequently breaks cover in issues around social virtue & competing rights, where the charge of prejudice can be more easily avoided and discrimination given a veener of respectability through an appeal to just deserts or equality of treatment. It has become a mainstay of media commentary in recent years, from the notions of the "undeserving poor" and "problem families" to the indulgence of gender-critical feminists in their scepticism about trans rights. On the one hand a section of society is congenitally deficient and "not pulling its weight", on the other a minority is disruptive of a natural order and destabilising to a wider good.

The practicalities of eugenics are also elided unless addressed in their strong form of selective breeding, sterilisation or euthanasia. In other words, Nazis. This is because in their soft form they have long been central to the liberal state in the forms of natalist policies. While selective breeding for heritable characteristics gets the headlines, eugenic practice has largely been about encouraging the birth of healthy native sons and daughters, their biopolitical optimisation and more recently genetic correction. For all its investment in meritocracy, postwar social democracy was selective and essentialist, hence the slow progress towards gender equality, the segregation of the disabled and the treatment of immigrants as temporary "stock". One reason why eugenics is popular among a strand of the British right is that it would require the ruthless exercise of the levers of the state (I suspect this, rather than an obsession with phrenology, explains the attraction for Dominic Cummings). These "nationalists" are quite different to the free-market libertarians who would shrink the state and divest government of all concern for population growth and personal health.

The philosophical objection to eugenics is not that qualities of social value aren't intrinsic or heritable (though they're mostly not) but that we cannot know, let alone collectively agree, what a "better" population would be. We can debate what a better society would be, and we can exercise choice in the matter through elections and other mechanisms, but we reserve the right to change our mind. This is why we have historically supported soft eugenics, from free school milk to a woman's right to abortion, but balked at anything that smacked of coercion or irreversibility. Rejecting the harder form of eugenics is partly an argument against utilitarianism and the treating of people as means rather than ends, but it's also a recognition that the future is simply unknowable (Hayek was sceptical of eugenics for this reason, as much as because of his aversion to planning). The history of public policy tells us that we will inevitably make errors of judgement when it comes to future social value.

The recognition of the "waste" of women's abilities in the immediate postwar years is an example of how that value changes. Initially, the belief was that women could best contribute to society by making homes and raising children. Changes in the economy gradually led to the recognition that their social value would be greater if they worked too. Both views were utilitarian - more concerned with social contribution that personal flourishing - so neither is necessarily admirable, but what matters is the change. A eugenicist policy would have to eschew any such change or risk becoming arbitrary. It also presumes a fixed template not only of social but of human value. In its hard form, "Life not worthy of life". The precautionary principle suggests that even if we adopt a rigorously utilitarian approach, we should be tolerant of variety because its value is not immutable. To take a more recent example, consider the growing awareness of the talent of the autistic in the digital economy.

Eugenics is not about designing a better future but about restoring a mythical past. It is extreme conservatism, hence it is ultimately indistinguishable from ancestor-worship. The inherent contradiction is that it presents as radical and transformative (or at least as edgy and inconoclastic) but it is driven by a vision that obsesses over rank and elitist cultural capital (eugencists are invariably snobs). The intellectual wandering of eugenics, from the Fabians through the Nazis to contemporary national-populists, is a clue to its fundamental dynamic: revolution in the service of reaction. It is the adoption of utilitarian principles and the pragmatic of state power to preserve a traditional hierarchy of privilege. The departure of Sabisky for saying the quiet part out loud does not suggest that this underlying project is about to hit the buffers. Meanwhile his critics see no irony in amplifying this mini-drama of natural selection into a debate about Dominic Cummings' status.