Eugenics, prayers & certainty

Reading Jonathan Freedland’s piece on  the soft left’s dalliance with eugenics reminded me of the argument about whether town councils should say prayers at their meetings. What links these two different issues is that both sides appeal to an illusory certainty.

Take eugenics first. On the one side, eugenicists were certain that the state had the power to affect the composition of the race. Reading Sidney Webb’s The Decline of the Birth Rate (pdf) one is struck not only by the vile racism - he frets about the country “falling to the Irish and the Jews“ - but also by the utter absence of any doubt about the state’s competence.

On the other side, though, stands a claim that people have a right to have children. And rights - being entitlements - are things we possess with certainty. Freedland writes:

What was missing was any value placed on individual freedom, even the most basic freedom of a human being to have a child. The middle class and privileged felt quite ready to remove that right from those they deemed unworthy of it.

We have here a clash of certainties - the certainty of state competence versus the certainty that a right exists.

Which is what we have in the Bideford town council case. The protagonists claim that this is a clash of rights, of certainties. Clive Bone claimed that prayers violated his right to be free of religion, whilst Eric Pickles said: "Public authorities - be it Parliament or a parish council - should have the right to say prayers before meetings if they wish."

However, in both cases the argument should not be about certainties, but rather about mundane competence.

The argument against eugenics is not that people have a right to have children. It’s not clear that they do. John Stuart Mill thought they didn’t. He wrote:

To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime.

And at least one recent book on human rights is almost silent on whether this “right exists.

Instead, the argument is simply that the state is just not competent to adjudicate who should have children; if eugenicists ruled the world, there’d be no jazz or blues music and not just because of the colour of the musicians’ skins.

Similarly, in the Bideford case, the argument against saying prayers at council meetings is not one of rights, but, again, one of competence. Quite simply, council meetings should be devoted to council business, not to prayer. In fairness, this was how the judge ruled - not that either side seems to care about that.

The fact that these two cases are separated by 80 years is depressing. It shows that experience doesn’t teach us that our knowledge of public life and moral affairs is fragile and partial. Instead,  we see the same appeal to a non-existent certainty in different guises.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

The notion that having children is a "right" smells like post-hoc rationalisation. We have an evolutionary impulse to seek sexual pleasure, which may have the consequence of producing a child.

As societies gain effective birth control, and as the economic benefits of kids decline (e.g. as a form of pension), then birth rates tend to drop. This means that kids are then more likely to be a deliberate choice (rather than an accident or unavoidable fate), which is perhaps why we start to see this as the exercise of a right.

It's worth remembering that most eugenics programmes (both actual and theoretical) not only sought to weed out "lives not worthy of life", but also to encourage higher birth rates among the healthy majority. There remain fragments of this today in the form of baby bounties, e.g. the 3rd child benefits in France.

The belief that the state is (still) competent to enact such measures probably owes a lot to the general reluctance to debate the alternatives, chiefly the need for youth immigration in rapidly greying European countries. Of course, immigration is an area that falls within government's competence.

[Chris Purnell]

Councils have a duty to conduct business and that is all. Claiming to have a need for divine 'guidance' in order to fulfil that duty appears to be far-fetched. Of course, as individuals councillors may seek divine guidance but they can't introduce it as a council function. Prayers could not part of an agenda within the scope of council 'business'.

[Chris Baylor]

Oh my my!

[Laban Tall]

"eugenicists were certain that the state had the power to affect the composition of the race"

To be fair, our rulers have the same certainty - they're just aiming for different outcomes.

[Recusant]

Well, since, at the basic biological/Darwinian level, our sole function is to reproduce and produce the next generation, if reproduction is not a right, what is?

[Keith]

I think the general point is that eugenics and forced sterilisation etc are based on making dire assumptions about the effect of exponential population growth, which turn out to be wrong or at least based on unverifiable one sided views of the effects of such growth on society. Assuming the worst possible combination of consequences produces support for extreme policies. A more sceptical approach to all public policy would reduce the danger of mistaken laws and policies.