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The Eugenic Records Office director Harry Laughlin drew up a model eugenics law in 1932. This, together with his and Davenport’s energetic lobbying, eventually persuaded thirty states to pass laws allowing for the compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed and dependent.
Nazi Germany sterilised 400,000 people in the six years after Hitler came to power, including schizophrenics, depressives, epileptics, and disabled people of all kinds. It forbade sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews, and then began systematically to persecute Jews in multiple ways.
People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up.
It was an evolutionary, spontaneous and unplanned phenomenon that slowed population growth. Unexpected, unpredicted and unheralded, people started having smaller families because they were richer, healthier, more urban, more liberated and more educated.
Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilisation programme was wrong; China’s one-child policy was wrong. These were sins of commission, not omission. Malthusian misanthropy – the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race – was wrong pragmatically as well as morally.
American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.
‘Give someone monarch-like authority, and sooner or later there will be a royal screwup.’
that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life; that people are ‘thinking, energetic, creative and caring’; and that the best human organisations are ones like voluntary bodies that are not managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves.
This process of economic development is by far the most momentous and extraordinary thing that has happened in recent decades.
The economist William Easterly points out that the evidence for a change of leadership being the cause of a growth miracle anywhere in the developing world is wholly lacking: the timing simply does not match.
The story of economic development is a bottom–up story. The story of lack of development is a top–down story.
that humanitarian help is a good thing, and that getting food to famine victims, medicine to disease victims and shelter to disaster victims is absolutely the right thing to do.
In that sense, well-intentioned aid money may have played a role in creating the world’s most murderous regime.
But before the British left, they put in place a system of technocratic development that ensured a ready supply of command, control and money for the strong men to appropriate.
So Britain’s administration in its colonies suddenly became less about administering justice and much more about promoting economic development.
the Americans in the Cold War. They could disguise their support for anti-Soviet allies under a covering of neutral aid, distributing World Bank loans in places like Colombia both to promote development and to buttress anti-communist regimes.
In effect, the cattlemen of the nineteenth century rediscovered what medieval merchants had found – that customs and laws would emerge where they were not imposed. It was very far from anarchic.
Government at its root is an arrangement among citizens to enforce public order. It emerges spontaneously at least as much as, perhaps more than, it is imposed by outsiders.
When villages or bands get beyond a certain size, interpersonal codes of conduct become unworkable. There is too much anonymity.
‘This bottom–up process of institutional emergence was the result of inmate actions, but not the execution of any inmate design.’ It evolved.
The effect of the gangs was to suppress violence, increase trade in drugs and other goods, lower prices, and generally improve the inmates’ lives.
And the reason gangs did not form in female prisons was simply because their population was still small enough for norms, codes of conduct, to work instead.
That is to say, government began as a mafia protection racket claiming a monopoly on violence and extracting a rent (tax) in return for protecting its citizens from depredation by outsiders. This is the origin of almost all government, and today’s mafia protection rackets are all in the process of evolving into government.
George Washington said that ‘Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.’
Just as Henry VII acted like a Corleone, so Islamic State, the Colombian FARC, the Mafia itself, the Irish Republican Army all come to behave more and more like government – enforcing a strict moral code, ‘taxing’ commodities (opium, cocaine, waste disposal), punishing transgressors, providing welfare.
Government was something that lived parasitically off the backs of the working people, spending the money it extorted on war and luxury and oppression. ‘The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern,’ said Lord Acton. ‘Every class is unfit to govern.’
It would have made no sense to have argued that the state was the organ of liberty and progress. These were, remember, the days when the state not only claimed a monopoly of violence and the power to decide what might be traded, but prescribed in intrusive detail your religious observance, censored your speech and writing, and even mandated your dress according to class.
Liberals were trying to lift the dead hand of the corrupt and tyrannical state from the market economy as well as from the private life of the citizen. In those days, to be suspicious of a strong state was to be left-wing.
that extraordinary spell between 1840 and 1865 when Britain set the world an example and unilaterally and forcefully dismantled the tariffs that entangled the globe.
He was a genuine radical. Yet he embraced free trade as the best possible means for achieving both peace and prosperity for all. ‘Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,’ he said, sounding like a member of the Tea Party.
‘Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.
Extremists have much in common
In July 1948 Ludwig Erhard, director of West Germany’s Economic Council, abolished food rationing and ended all price controls on his own initiative, trusting to the market.
The German economic miracle was born that day; Britain kept rationing for six more years.
projects were told to start small, fail fast, get feedback from users early, and evolve as they went along. When I interviewed Mr Bracken about this approach, which by 2014 had begun to have some striking successes, not least in the gradual but accelerating roll-out of a single government web portal named gov.uk to replace 1,800 separate websites, I realised that what he was describing was evolution, as opposed to creationism.
Yet my argument will be that this phenomenon can only be explained as an instance of cultural evolution: that all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds.
Unlike Jesus, Apollonius was a famous Pythagorean intellectual known throughout the Near East. His birth had been foretold, he abjured sex, drank no wine and wore no animal skins. He was altogether more sophisticated than the Palestinian carpenter. He moved in grand circles: the dead person he raised was the child of a senator. His fame spread well beyond the Roman lands. When he arrived at Babylon, the Parthian King Vardanes greeted him as a celebrity and invited him to stay and teach for a year.
Remarkably, they all seem to recommend some version of the golden rule – do as you would be done by – as illustrated by precepts of Buddhism, Judaism, Jainism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam.
The story of Lot, Sodom and the pillars of salt is mentioned in the Koran in a way that implies it happened locally – and it almost certainly refers to salt features found close to the Dead Sea.
Thus, Islam was more the consequence than the cause of Arab conquest. There is nothing uniquely Muslim about this. It is what Christianity and Judaism did also: construct elaborate back-stories to obscure their origins. We can see it most clearly in recent religious innovations, like Mormonism and Scientology.
I have never forgotten that experience – it taught me just how ready people are to believe supernatural explanations, to trust ‘experts’ (or prophets) even when they are blatantly phony, to prefer any explanation to the mundane and obvious one, and to treat any sceptic as a heretic to be shouted at rather than an agnostic to be persuaded by reason and evidence. Of course, crop circles were too trivial to lead to a whole new religion, but that’s my point.
For centuries most of the world convinced itself that the only reason people act morally is because of instruction, that in effect without superstition there can be no ethical behaviour. Priests are continually insisting that there is a link between observance and outcomes, between prayer and good fortune or between sin and illness.
With that premise of sin driving illness, then someone has been very bad to provoke the pandemic.
The psychologist B.F. Skinner kept pigeons in a cage where a machine produced food at regular intervals. He noticed that some of the pigeons seemed to become convinced that whatever they had been doing just before the food appeared was the cause of the food appearing. The pigeons therefore repeated these habits.
the experiment ‘might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition’, and reckoned there were many analogies in human behaviour.
But the truth is we all have it to some degree or other, which is why religious belief is found in every part of the world and every age of history, while rational scepticism is a rare and often lonely stance that leaves Lucretius, Spinoza, Voltaire and Dawkins as heretics. Indeed, the paradox of this realisation is that if belief (in the broad sense of the word) is universal, then no amount of argument can extinguish it, and in a sense therefore, gods really do exist – but inside our heads rather than outside.
I should candidly admit that scientists are as prone as any of us to this tendency towards belief. I have become steadily less, rather than more, confident in my ability to distinguish pseudoscience from true science. I am close to certain that astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience. Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience. Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience. Vaccination is science; vaccination scares are pseudoscience. Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience. Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.
For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground. You will notice that this applies to most religions.
The secret of life, unexpectedly, turned out to be an infinitely combinatorial message written in digital form in three-letter words in a four-letter alphabet.
I like this description of DNA
though actually it is one of the most beautiful ideas ever to cross a human mind – that life is information.
Science, said Richard Feynman, is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
But I am pointing out that there is a long-standing human tradition to become so enthusiastic about a favoured scientific, religious or superstitious explanation for the world as to close your mind and come to hate those who disagree.
