Euphemism

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now, if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke of the methods "of the stud-farm" many Eugenists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest champions in the other interest had written "What nonsense this education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?" Which most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or again, when I spoke of people "being married forcibly by the police," another distinguished Eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few days after I saw a Eugenist pronouncement, to the effect that the State ought to extend its powers in this area. The State can only be that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion; and this area can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents. He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar. I do mean that nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near the church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in stables and scrubbed down by grooms. He meant that they would undergo a loss of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that the only formula important to Eugenists would be "by Smith out of Jones." Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists.

—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), chapter 2. This is an important, witty, and morally serious work; I’d not read it until this fall. There are passages of uncommon common sense and deep Christian wisdom (as in this passage), against one of the perennial evils of the modern age. And yet, occasionally, Chesterton’s own prejudices stand in the way of his overall point. The more-than-stray asides about Jews (and once or twice about black Africans) reveal either his own incomplete internalization of the very point he is seeking to make about eugenics’ evil (namely, that it segregates humanity into breeds and races, some of whom are supposedly superior to others) or, what is in a sense worse, his willingness to play to the crowd with a cheap joke about Exotic Others, the falsity of which he understands all too well but chooses to ignore just to get a laugh. In any case, the book is well worth a read, but Chesterton’s own failures are intermittently on display. Probably the best way to interpret that fact is to use it as an occasion for recognition: namely, that one’s own burning moral passions, especially those one is unquestionably right about, are likely, as with Chesterton, not yet entirely or consistently comprehended, much less enacted, either in word or deed. We are none of us wholly converted in this life.