Today’s eugenics is much more dangerous

MY COLLEAGUE, John Authers, recently argued that George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is the most prophetic novel about our era. I would suggest that an earlier book written by another Old Etonian deserves to share the palm: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

It envisions a future in which genetic engineering has become so advanced that human beings are designed as cogs in the great industrial machine that is modernity: rulers (Alphas), middle managers (Betas) semi-skilled workers (Gammas), low-skilled workers (Deltas) and menial workers (Epsilons).

Everywhere I look these days I am reminded of Huxley’s world. The latest Silicon Valley fashion is for tech investors to fund fertility startups such as Orchid Health, which proclaims, “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.”

The latest billionaire status symbol is a quiver full of children: Elon Musk has more than a dozen and Peter Thiel, a late starter, reportedly has four. The plot of a new science-fiction series, Alien: Earth, features trillionaires, ensconced in rival territories, who compete to produce the best super-humans.

Associating this with eugenics might seem far-fetched – rather like the brouhaha about the advertisement for American Eagle jeans that claims that Sydney Sweeney has great “genes”. Most people associate eugenics with the worst crime that humanity has committed – Adolf Hitler’s mad scheme to breed an Aryan super-race and liquidate the Jewish people.

Yet, Hitler’s version of eugenics was only an extreme version of a faith that was pervasive in the West from 1880 to 1945: a faith that was as popular in the Anglo-Saxon world as the Teutonic one (the term was invented by an Englishman, Francis Galton, by putting together two Greek words “eu” or “good” and “gene” or “birth”) and as popular on the progressive left as the nationalist right.

In those years, enthusiasm for eugenics was almost universal among Anglo-Saxon intellectuals left, right or centre, with the exception of Roman Catholics such as GK Chesterton.

Nationalists such as Karl Pearson regarded the quality of the population as a vital dimension of national power. Centrists such as JM Keynes regarded improving the population as a necessary dimension of general social improvement. Socialists such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw believed in “socialisation for the selective breeding of man”.

Even a liberal gadfly such as Bertrand Russell argued that the state should provide everyone with coloured “procreation tickets”, and come down hard on people who fraternised with the wrong colour ticket.

Eugenics drew on two of the period’s most powerful feelings: optimism in the ability of science to solve intractable problems, and pessimism about the deterioration of the population.

Eugenicists dreamed of eliminating genetic problems such as “mental deficiency”, and thereby reducing crime and poverty. They also worried that Charles Darwin’s mighty force – the survival of the fittest – was going into reverse thanks to the higher likelihood of “the better sort of people” availing themselves of contraception. In 1934, the demographer Enid Charles published a vivid book entitled The Twilight of Parenthood.

The eugenics movement was driven as much by the spirit of scientific problem-solving as racist ideology.

Leading universities such as University College, London, had chairs of eugenics. Birth-control pioneers such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes tried to liberate women from unwanted pregnancies. Eugenicists were forever coming up with technical innovations such as IQ tests or intellectual breakthroughs such as the theory of polygenetic inheritance.

What is most striking about the current revival of eugenics is that it is echoing almost every feature of the pre-war movement: it is taking place across the political spectrum, not just on the far right, drawing on fears about population decline as well as hopes about eliminating terrible diseases, and advancing through incremental problem-solving more than political agitation.

Given that any mention of genetic determinism was forbidden until a few years ago, it is remarkable how many people, right, left and centre, are willing to flirt with eugenic-coded themes.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Donald Trump might boast that he wants to be known as “the fertility president”. But Noor Siddiqui, the young boss of Orchid, would fit into any high-end yoga class. Simone and Malcolm Collins, leading figures in the pro-natalist movement, go out of their way to demonstrate their liberal credentials to reporters.

Today’s eugenics draws on the same mixture of optimism and pessimism as the pre-war variety.

Optimism about the power of genetics to “optimise” the species: Orchid’s Siddiqui has tweeted about ushering in “a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease”. Pessimism about the advanced world’s hostility to the basic biological imperative of reproducing the species.

A growing school of pro-natalists has warned that falling birth rates would lead to economic and civilisational collapse. And many leading Trumpists are doing their best to avert the potential disaster: Sean Duffy, the transport secretary, has nine children; Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, has seven.

Today’s eugenics is also driven, like its predecessor, by incremental scientific progress.

Parents have long been able to screen embryos for cystic fibrosis or Down syndrome. Now, genetic screening allows them to test for a wide range of genetic predispositions, while advances in the technology of in-vitro fertilisation allow couples who have no problem conceiving to avail themselves of embryo screening. Orchid will provide you with a polygenic risk score for US$2,200 per embryo.

All of which raises an inevitable question: What are the chances that the current vogue will morph into a nightmare in the same way that the previous vogue did?

Today’s advocates of genetic screening reject the term eugenics because there is no compulsion involved. Genomic Prediction even uses the slogan “choice over chance”. Yet, yesterday’s eugenics was not defined by compulsion.

Eugenicists distinguished between “positive” eugenics (encouraging the “right” people to reproduce) and “negative” eugenics (discouraging the “wrong” people from reproducing), and not even all negative eugenics involved compulsion: The British Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 insisted that sterilisation should be voluntary.

Nor is the distinction between voluntary and compulsory as clear-cut as today’s advocates of genetic screening imagine. If some parents start availing themselves of genetic advantages, then others may feel obliged to do likewise – such is the pressure of the rat race. And, if the rich freely avail themselves of genetic screening, then pressure will mount for the state (or employers) to provide it for the rest of us.

Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, co-founder of the Berkeley Genomics Project, added that humanity may not have any choice but to breed smarter humans if it is to prevent artificial intelligence from running out of control.  

The moral defences against the misuse of genetics are weaker today than they were before World War II, thanks to the waning of Christianity. (Ross Douthat’s discussion with Siddiqui is worth watching in part because she frequently treats his religiously themed argument with incomprehension.) And today’s commercial forces are far more powerful than they were in the old days.

Companies are competing to push the envelope on “optimisation”: startups such as Nucleus Genomics and Herasight are going further than Orchid, by offering IQ predictions based on genetic tests.

The growing competition between China and the US also adds a worrying element to all this: What if a rival great power puts its muscle behind breeding superior humans?

The Chinese state has already conditioned its people to accept population engineering, through its one-child policy and the sterilisation of selected Uyghurs. (The government even passed a eugenics and health protection law forbidding people with mental and physical disorders from having children; it later abandoned the word “eugenic”, though not the policy.)

Now, there are signs that it is experimenting with genetic engineering (as opposed to just genetic screening) to produce higher-quality citizens.

“Drone warfare will seem quaint if we are faced with genetically enhanced PLA (People’s Liberation Army) super-soldiers with fused human and artificial intelligence,” warned a recent report from the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.

The real question is not whether Huxley or Orwell produced a more convincing portrait of the future. It is what combination of their dueling nightmares we will end up inhabiting. BLOOMBERG