Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

There was a broad and deep belief in the first two thirds of the twentieth century that everyone and everything could be reinvented, that the old ways could be swept away, the past forgotten, the future controlled, human nature reshaped, and it often was yoked to the idea that an elite—sometimes an elite of scientists, sometimes of politicians—could be trusted with these immense transformations. Eugenics was in its own way, like Lamarckism, an idea that human beings could be pressed into perfection, a monstrous means justified by dubiously utopian ends. Many then seemed to believe that human nature, as psychology as well as biology, was malleable enough that the way humans lived and thought and loved and worked could be reinvented.

There was a broad and deep belief in the first two thirds of the twentieth century that everyone and everything could be reinvented, that the old ways could be swept away, the past forgotten, the future controlled, human nature reshaped, and it often was yoked to the idea that an elite—sometimes an elite of scientists, sometimes of politicians—could be trusted with these immense transformations. Eugenics was in its own way, like Lamarckism, an idea that human beings could be pressed into perfection, a monstrous means justified by dubiously utopian ends. Many then seemed to believe that human nature, as psychology as well as biology, was malleable enough that the way humans lived and thought and loved and worked could be reinvented.