Wells, Galton and Biopower: Breeding Human Animals

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, 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 crétins.1 In a recent article on ‘Biopower, Genetics, and Livestock Breeding’, Holloway, Morris, Gilna and Gibbs argue that advances in human genetics change our understanding of ‘how biotechnologies transform the lives and bodies of nonhumans, and perhaps in particular, nonhuman animals’.2In a disturbing vein they go on to assert that ‘livestock breeding can be seen as a process of co-producing humans and nonhumans’ in that new knowledge practices in human genetics are increasingly being applied to nonhuman domesticated animals.3For the authors, new discoveries in human DNA redefine the biosocial collectivity through the application of regimes of knowledge based on human genetics to the bodies of non-human animals. This is an ironic reversal of Francis Galton's argument quoted above. Human genetics are now being deployed to improve the breeding of domesticated animals, rather than livestock breeding being used as a model for the management of human reproduction. The arguments in both cases, one from 1864 and the other from 2009, show how animal and human bodies are implicated through livestock breeding practices in what Michel Foucault termed ‘biopower’.4 In Foucault's terms, ‘biopower’ is the treatment of humans as a ‘population’ amenable to management in the same terms as other natural resources. While Foucault characteristically invokes ‘power’ as a pervasive force without a centre, Giorgio Agamben gives it a locus in state sovereignty. Agamben has traced how the ‘animal’ as a category has been used to open up areas for oppression and genocide, especially in the Holocaust, by state power.5Agamben's analysis underscores the obverse of the extension of animal rights, the use of the ‘animal’ to make human bodies accessible to biopower. While the history of the treatment of animals since the Victorian period can be read as a triumphal extension of their rights, beginning with Henry Stephens Salt's Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894), Agamben's approach suggests a counter-reading in which the increased understanding of evolution created a framework within which human bodies were increasingly subject to technoscientific manipulation in the name of the ‘animal’. The erasure of the boundary between humans and animals under the rubric of evolution, a process inaugurated by Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and promoted thereafter by Galton, was thus a double-edged sword, allowing the extension of animal rights, but also making the human population the site of managed bodily modification based on livestock breeding. Biopower can be thought of as ‘a techne that opens worlds’6and livestock breeding is an important tool in the process. Galton used livestock breeding as a technology that opened up new possibilities in the control of human reproduction, a procedure that H.G. Wells contested. Wells's writings of the 1890s mount a critique of the use of the breeding of animals as a model for this deliberate manipulation of the human population. In essays such as ‘Human Evolution: An Artificial Process’, Wells argued that a direct application of ‘natural selection’ to the ‘civilized human animal’ was impossible.7However, he thought progress could be achieved through state intervention and self-government to develop the ‘artificial man’ by means of ‘a sufficiently intelligent exterior agent’.8Wells said that this was the conflict that he dramatized in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).9 The term ‘animal’ in the 1890s and into the early twentieth century thus became the site of a contest between those who would simply and directly apply a model of animal breeding to humans, and those, like Wells and Havelock Ellis, who questioned the terms and procedures of this form of ‘artificial selection’. For the eugenicists, evolution was reimagined as a technology for management of the human population, culminating in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.10As Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford have argued, ‘eugenics offered particular technologies that might be taken up by states, as nations were built and rebuilt, generated and regenerated by scientists, statesmen and political planers’ through hygienic and reproductive practices that were offered for the greater good of the population.11By imagining humans as domestic animals, eugenics opened up a space for biopower. At the same time, and especially in Wells's 1890s science fiction, technology itself is seen as bringing about changes in the human body as an adaptation not to a natural environment but to technology itself. For Wells, technology is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ evolution; both a means to effect change in the human population and itself a cause of bodily adaptation in the human population.12Wells's novels include some of the most sophisticated and nuanced thinking about evolution, technology, and the new theories advanced under the rubric of eugenics. As a trained scientist and a writer of science fiction, Wells stood in a contradictory position to eugenics, deeply uncomfortable with the class politics of the idea of the ‘fittest’ cited by Galton, but also committed to social engineering and the management of the population by intellectual elites. While he contested turning humans into domestic animals, he also subscribed to the assumption of the human as superior to the animal and represented technology as a way to evolve into a higher ‘mechanical body’13that would be free of the defects of the ‘natural’ animal body. For both Galton and Wells, Darwin's discussion of the modification of animal bodies by human breeders in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species was a crucial source for their vision of changes to the human population. Galton's eugenics programme was of course directly influenced by Darwin's theories and his innovation was to turn Darwin's unconscious into conscious selection. In a 1904 lecture entitled ‘Eugenics, its Definition, Scope, and Aims’, he laid out a plan for a national programme of social engineering in which eugenics would be ‘introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion’: It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.14 Galton is sometimes breathtakingly naive, assuming that eugenics could be disinterested in its application. While he used the concept of ‘religion’ here, what he had in mind was more like Foucault's concept of ‘governmentality’, an internalized set of beliefs and attitudes that would align the behaviours of the citizens with discourses of power rather than an overt dogma. Galton hoped that eugenics would become an internalized ‘creed’.15 Wells was in the audience for the lecture, and criticized Galton's suggestion that criminals should not be able to reproduce, arguing that a criminal might be the most intelligent member of his family and attempting to escape from an adverse environment.16Not surprisingly, Wells, who was acutely aware of social class in British society, as he showed in such novels as Kipps (1905), critiqued the class-based assumptions of Galton's definitions of ‘intelligence’ and the ‘fittest’. In Anticipations (1901), Wells had been sympathetic to a programme of selective breeding, arguing that in his vision of a New Republic ‘a small minority, for example, afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication’ would be prevented from reproducing. The intellectual leadership would ‘naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime’.17By the time of Galton's lecture, however, Wells had considerably revised his earlier enthusiasm for a deliberate programme of managed human reproduction. Wells's response to Galton was based on his attack on eugenics in Mankind in the Making (1903) in which he criticized the idea of using animal breeding as a model to select desirable characteristics in humans: [W]e are, as a matter of fact, not a bit clear what points to breed for and what points to breed out. The analogy with the breeder of cattle is a very misleading one. He has a very simple ideal, to which he directs the entire pairing of his stock. He breeds for beef, he breeds for calves and milk, he breeds for a homogeneous docile herd.18 Wells severed the analogy between animals and humans and attacked the categories that Galton would use to discriminate between ‘fitter’ and ‘less fit’ individuals in the selection of ‘fitter’ humans. The criteria used to select cattle were simple, where human characteristics were complex. Wells further argued that Galton's very terms were misguided when he turned his attention to the ‘breeding’ of the human population along the lines of animal husbandry: Nature is not a breeder; she is a reckless coupler and – she slays. It was a popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest […] that the average of a species in any respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals above the average.19 Wells subverts the idea that Nature is a kindly breeder of species and invokes an image closer to Tennyson's in In Memoriam (1850) of a blindly destructive force who proclaims ‘A thousand types are gone: | I care for nothing, all shall go’.20Wells also hammered home the point that some people would be actively prevented from breeding and that, in effect, certain populations would be killed off by this use of involuntary contraception. Wells countered Galton's claims for eugenics as a ‘provident, quick and kind’ way of applying ‘natural selection’ to humans by restoring the implicit violence of the process. It should be noted that, however, Wells did not raise any objection to the breeding or slaughter of animals; unlike Salt, he did not see animals as having ‘rights’. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells provides a parallel, highly ambivalent and complicated exploration of Galton's idea that humans could ‘co-operate with the workings of Nature’ in a faster and kinder way. 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