F. C. S. Schiller. Education and Eugenics.
Now the case is different, for social contra-selection offers manifold
facilities for the survival of the unfit. It is theoretically interesting to see
how this is done, but practically such contra-selection is dangerous, and not
to be regarded with complete complacency, even though we see that it may be
largely inevitable, and ethically salutary. But it is evident that even now there
are limits to the power of a society to shield its members. It relieves the
pressure on the individual largely by weakening the whole; and it is clearly
impossible to keep a society collectively progressive, and even alive, if its
members individually degenerate beyond a certain point. In spite of a
growing control over nature, which better methods of transmitting know
ledge render possible, there must come a point at which ancestral virtue and
inherited capital can no longer ensure the survival of an effete race of fools
and weaklings.
All existing societies, moreover, are probably much nearer this point
than they usually suppose. For the great institutions, which have the
social function of transmitting the treasures of accumulated knowledge
from generation to generation, are always liable to get out of order, and to
engender so much noxious rubbish as to clog their working and to poison
humanity. Religions reduce to ritual, and become spiritually dead. States
ossify into bureaucracies, which crush and sterilize all germs of progress.
Worst of all, there is a standing danger that educators should become the
worst foes to education. There is probably no system of education, and
no university, in the world which does not tend to an over-production of
pedantry and dogmatism, and which, if it were conducted wholly according
to the ideas of the “ experts ” whose duty it is to run it, would not become
worse than useless socially. For the experts, if left to themselves, tend to
develop professional ideals and standards of value of their own, which
grow independent of considerations of social welfare, and frequently run
counter to them. But if there should occur at any time a general break
down in the educational machinery which transmits the knowledge which
is power and means social security, it is evident that a society may be
propelled irreparably on the declivity that leads to its destruction. No
society, therefore, is safe unless it is constantly on its guard against its own
weaknesses, against the clogging of its institutions by their own waste
products and by the excesses of their virtues, against the repression of ability
and the preservation and promotion of unfitness, against the excessive delays
in perceiving when old adjustments have broken down and new devices
and new knowledge are needed to adapt human life to new conditions.
The social problem is so complex, and we are still so ignorant, that
any extensive or radical scheme of eugenics, which presupposes, or even
aims at, sudden and drastic changes in human nature, as all the utopias
have hitherto done, is scientifically out of the question. It is more than
enough to satisfy any reasonable ambition to counteract to some extent the
prevalent tendencies to racial decay; and this is not only possible, but
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