Bertrand Russell on the Public Engineering of Population Characteristics
A few days ago (here), while digressing on the sixth Chapter, “Marriage and the Population Question,” of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916, which appeared as Why we Fight Stateside), I promised some remarks on Russell’s proposed eugenics.* It is probably well known to my readers that in Marriage and Morals (1929), Russell went quite far down this road, including forced sterilization. Marriage and Morals plays a non-trivial role in the evolving views of academic freedom Stateside. The first edition of Marriage and Morals also includes rather racist views.
But quite a bit of Russell's views can already be discerned in the 1916 volume.+ And since that’s really the period in which Russell’s contributions to philosophy in the strictest sense (as he himself would identify it) are most significant, it’s worth focusing on the chapter in the earlier essay collection. I suggest that Russell’s eugenics program is, in fact, also motivated by concerns over deterioration of the genetic stock (although this is not wholly explicit but is something that can be inferred from Russell’s account).
This chapter begins with a discussion surrounding the law and norms of divorce and adultery. But the introduction of eugenic issues is signaled by Russell, while drawing on data by Sidney Webb (the Fabian socialist and himself an advocate of eugenics), by the discussion of the collapse of the general birth rate in France and England in combination of differential birth rates among different classes. (Russell is explicitly not much concerned with absolute population levels. (p. 126)) I quote the key passage:
Unless some change occurs, the sections that are dwindling will practically become extinct, and the population will be almost wholly replenished from the sections that are now increasing. The sections that are dwindling include the whole middle-class and the skilled artisans. The sections that are increasing are the very poor, the shiftless and drunken, the feeble-minded—feeble-minded women, especially, are apt to be very prolific. There is an increase in those sections of the population which still actively believe the Catholic religion, such as the Irish and the Bretons, because the Catholic religion forbids limitation of families. Within the classes that are dwindling, it is the best elements that are dwindling most rapidly. (pp. 123-124; hereafter my page-numbers are to the 14th impression from 1960.)
Russell goes on to explain that main two reasons that the well-off classes are dwindling is a direct effect of women’s increased freedom — middle class women are postponing and avoiding having children for a variety of reasons** — and the increasing cost of educating children at middle-class/skilled levels.
Obviously, the categories of the very poor, the shiftless and drunken, the feeble-minded, and (lest we forget) the Catholic need not have anything intrinsic in common. (Russell’s anti-Catholic prejudice is quite noticeable—he claims it makes one immune to reason.) Sometimes he refers to these groups as dragging down the character of the “most civilized” nations. (p. 125) This strongly implies that the “very poor, the shiftless etc.” are akin to savages or savage peoples. He also implies that the savages/”primitive races” are relatively homogeneous, and the “higher” ones increasingly differentiated (p. 134). Among the most civilized are the English, French, and Germans. (In such passages Russell sounds very much like J.S. Mill.)
As an aside, the danger to civilization of falling birthrates among the natural aristocrats is no small historical matter according to Russell. He speculates (albeit tentatively) that it may have something to do with the collapse of the Roman Empire. (p. 126) And the implication is that England (and its empire) is subject to the same cycle of civilizational rise and fall as it, and be subjugated “by less civilized races.” (p. 126) And, alarmingly, Russell’s message to his audience is that the barbarians are already in ‘our’ midst in huge numbers.
It might be tempting to think that for Russell the members of these groups might end up in the categories through sheer bad luck or environmental influences on their lives. For, an an earlier chapter (On Education) Russell castigates education for propagating ideological status quo bias; so it seems open to him to suggest that the people who end up in these groups are the product of a failed education system. And one can cherry-pick passages that support such agnosticism about causes and effects. Russell himself acknowledges, for example that “knowledge of hereditary” processes and the role of “parental example and early education” is still in its infancy. (p. 125)
But Russell immediately undermines that strategy as follows:
Within the classes that are dwindling, it is the best elements that are dwindling most rapidly. Working-class boys of exceptional ability rise, by means of scholarships, into the professional class; they naturally desire to marry into the class to which they belong by education, not into the class from which they spring; but as they have no money beyond what they earn, they cannot marry young, or afford a large family. The result is that in each generation the best elements are extracted from the working classes and artificially sterilized, at least in comparison with those who are left. (p. 124, emphasis added)
So, it is pretty clear that Russell rejects natural equality. And is attracted to a view — associated with natural aristocracy [or inequality] — that by nature there are better and worse people. So, let’s call this ‘the genetic component’ to sorting people by ability. Interestingly enough, on this view, the better sort of people derive benefit from the right sort of education apt to them (and only apt to them). Russell’s views on what consists of the better or worse kind involve a cluster of traits (prudence, energy, intellect etc.) whose exact content and phenotypical expression that need not concern us here.
Russell’s policy prescription to halt these trends also reveals a bit about his thinking on the underlying mechanisms:
If the [natural] sterilizing of the best parts of the population is to be arrested, the first and most pressing necessity is the removal of the economic motives for limiting families. The expense of children ought to be borne wholly by the community. Their food and clothing and education ought to be provided, not only to the very poor as a matter of charity, but to all classes as a matter of public interest. In addition to this, a woman who is capable of earning money, and who abandons wage-earning for motherhood, ought to receive from the State as nearly as possible what she would have received if she had not had children. The only condition attached to State maintenance of the mother and the children should be that both parents are physically and mentally sound in all ways likely to affect the children. Those who are not sound should not be debarred from having children, but should continue, as at present, to bear the expense of children themselves. [p. 128]
It’s an interesting question how Russell proposes to measure physical and mental soundness as a condition for receiving support. (It is especially challenging for him because he acknowledges that “artificial inequalities” (p. 129) continue to exist in England.) And how he proposes to establish income foregone for those who decide to abandon wage-earning (unless he simply proposes to use the last monthly income as the proxy.) And, again, one may well think that Russell’s views are wholly compatible with a culturalist interpretation of hereditary.
But he then shows his hand in a most striking fashion: “If the State is to undertake the expense of children, it has the right, on eugenic grounds, to know who the father is…” (p. 128) The father would be irrelevant if one didn’t also think that ‘genetic component’ is at least somewhat crucial. (Yes, he goes to suggest that temporary stability of the union is also important, so he clearly does not ignore culturalist elements.) Russell is forthright (when discussing an objection) that his view “regards some men as better than others.” (p. 129)
With this in mind, there is a natural way to read Russell (1916) as treating his own eugenics program — with its differential treatment of the population — as transitional in character and that he wishes to anticipate the so-called ‘new eugenics,’ that has become popular in our time among those who claim to respect liberal values and yet are fond of eugenics. The closing sentence of the chapter nicely illustrates this:
Here, as elsewhere, liberty is the basis of political wisdom. And when liberty has been won, what remains to be desired must be left to the conscience and religion of individual men and women. (p. 136)
Let me wrap up. The very same Russell, who is an exemplar in moral courage in standing against the senseless warmongering of his peers and against the militarism of the British empire, also wished to organize the state to promote the flourishing of a natural aristocracy (to which he belongs) at the expense of those with less natural ability. The really egregious formulation and racial policies associated with these views are made explicit a decade later, but it’s not as if they would be difficult to discern.
I have not argued against Russell’s view here, although I have suggested that operationalizing it will implicate him in a kind of status quo bias that he himself has already undercut in earlier chapters. But in so far as his version of early analytic philosophy is invested in a form of scientific philosophy that is cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist (as Alexander Klein has convincingly argued) in character, it’s also explicitly committed to a form of progressivism and engineering of demographic characteristics. To what degree we can really keep the eugenics and natural inequality at arm’s length of the so-called ‘core’ elements of his program is an open question.
*This blog post originates in a reading group on these Principles with the eminent scholars, Alex Klein and Sander Verhaegh. The usual caveats apply.
+For scholarship that anticipates my argument, see John V. Day (2015) "Bertrand Russell on Eugenics." Mankind Quarterly 55.3.
**The only temporary feature of the low birth rate that Russell recognizes is the “excess of women.” (p. 127) Since he is writing in 1916 I assume he means to refer to the men at the front or killed in battle.