BBC4TV have broadcast an interesting two-part documentary about the history and legacy of eugenics…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008zc7
Eugenics was a scientific theory elaborated, during the 19C, as an attempt to justify an ideology of racial and class superiority. The idea originates as a reaction to the enlightenment proposal of equality regardless of race, gender or age. The scientific basis of the theory is now recognised as entirely unfounded. Nevertheless, and as the programme shows, the idea has, against all the evidence. The 19C elaboration of eugenics did produce some substantial statistical tools.
Here’s a note about how the idea developed as a combination of science and politics. The first expression of anxiety in relation to proposed social equality was drafted by Thomas Malthus as an expression of resource anxiety in relation to population growth. The utilitarian philosophers elaborated a system of moral calculus to support political science by appeal to evidence-based outcomes and the greatest benefit. Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution, mis-represented as the survival of the fittest, was later used to justify a politics of social-Darwinism elaborated by Herbert Spencer and perfected, in the 20C, by the German military-industrial complex of the Third Reich. It was shocking to see how so-many of these ideas originated in Britain.
Last year I gave a series of lectures, to stage one students, about the exclusions attaching to enlightenment social philosophy. Here’s part of the text I drafted to support the lectures
Destruction and Progress
We like to think of change as progress. Nowadays, we live in an age of permanent change.
In this context, the activity of design is understood as an implicit criticism of the way things are…otherwise things wouldn’t need to change, and we wouldn’t need new stuff.
The dissent implied by design provides for a form of destruction.
No one sets out to imagine a future that’s worse than today. It’s usual to want something better. That’s progress expressed as change and through ideas and politics. It’s this desire for progressive change that opens a space for design in society.
18C Philosophical Enlightenment
The activity of design is part of a social, political, economic and intellectual phenomenon that is a consequence of a philosophical project of rational Enlightenment. One of the consequences of this has been Modernism, and also post-Modernism etc. Design is conceptually attached to the idea of the continuous and progressive change implicit in Modernity.
Originally this all began through the scientific methodology of observation, measurement and interpretation. This was used, during the early-modern era, to attack the received wisdoms of religious superstition. In the 18C scientific philosophers began to question the traditional organisation of society and to propose forms of society built on different social relations and a more equal balance of power.
By the end of the 18C, the philosophical Enlightenment, happening simultaneously in Germany, France, Great Britain and America, proposed a series of rights attaching to all people regardless of wealth, gender, age or race. The evident political correctness of these rights suggested that they be universally applied across the founding populations of the American and French republics…
The new republics expressed their idealism through constitutional reform towards democracy and through a language of liberty, equality and fraternity. Notwithstanding this language, it’s obvious that, 250 years later, we are still confronted by massive inequalities across human populations in terms of race, age and gender…
The political structure of republican democracy and philosophical Enlightenment was built upon the psychological and emotional reality of human identity. Briefly, human beings (male) were conceptualised as creatures of reason. Rational agency assumed the alignment, through self-interest, of the individual with patterns of routine afforded by stable and secure government and by trade. The Enlightenment republics also proposed universal standards across the social, moral and economic spheres, so as to optimise the consistent and orderly working of society and economy. The Utilitarian school of philosophy, active in Britain at the beginning of the 19C, developed a form of moral calculus by which to measure and manage this process of progress.
Enlightenment and Entitlement
The 18C philosophers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson especially, understood very well that republican democracy would have to engage with the realities of human cognition and emotional intelligence. Accordingly, the pursuit of happiness was expressed as a founding constitutional objective.
On an individual basis, the ego provides a powerful and individuated sense of self-worth. Without it and on an individual basis, human beings would struggle to survive. In collective form, the ego produces a powerful sense of exceptionalism. All human groups, ranging in size from the family to the corporate and to the nation, develop this. In turn, the sense of exceptionalism develops into a form of cult that enshrines entitlement through exclusion and enclosure…So, at the heart of the Enlightenment is a powerful contradiction between the expression of politically correct and universally applicable rights within a system of personal exclusion and environmental enclosure.
Enlightenment and Power
The theory of rational agency, proposed within the new republics, rejected the world of feeling (female, infant, other) as arbitrary and inconsistent. Accordingly, the republics quickly organised institutional structures that would form the social body in its own image and correct any inconsistent behaviour. Resistance was quickly understood as futile…
The French academic, Michel Foucault, has described how any such inconstancy was quickly identified, within the precincts of the republic, as either criminal or lunatic. Accordingly, a system of administration and architecture was elaborated to manage the rehabilitation of the individual through the structures of prison and asylum. In the first instance, this architecture was conceptualised, by Jeremy Bentham, as a panoptic environment of observational control. Later, these forms of control were further extended so as to apply to school, factory and clinic.
Foucault identified that, whatever the expression of equality within the republic, the systems and structures of control applied disproportionately to certain sections of society…children, women, criminals and to the physically and psychologically infirm. It was no coincidence that each of these groups was already identified, by the administration, as economically compromised. Accordingly, these groups were segregated and excluded from the productive economy of society.
The Theatre of Machines and the Great Standardisation
The division of labour was first conceptualised by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith used the famous example of the pin workshop to illustrate his point. The division of labour, within the craft-based and artisan factory, allows for a massively increased productivity of output. The combining, by Smith, of efficiency, production and rational self-interest, provided the template for the industrial revolution.
Implicit in Smith’s concept was the specialisation of labour. This is the principle that suggests that, once you have divided up the process, it makes sense for the various operatives to specialise. They will become better (more efficient and more productive) through practice. We automatically do this for everyday activities around the house (putting up shelves, or washing up and laundry, for example)…
These organising principles were first made evident, on an industrial scale, at the Portsmouth Block Mill (1796). Samuel Bentham, Henry Maudslay and Marc Brunel arranged the factory so that steam power, machine tools and the division of labour were combined to orchestrate a fantastic mechanical ballet of production. According to this organisation, the rhythms of production were increasingly set by the tempo of the machine. It’s no coincidence that this system was first set up within a military context.
Balancing the productive output of this machinery required the observational control of resources and machines, along with the disciplinary control, by management, of the quality and quantity of work produced through the direction of human agency. In such environments, control and command were observational and disciplinary functions based on military experience.
Accordingly, the mathematician and logician Charles Babbage proposed the construction of a mechanical computing devices. These were the Difference Engine (1822) and Engine Number Two (1847). Subsequently, Babbage proposed an Analytical Engine (1871). This last device is now recognised as the precursor, in theoretical form at least, of the modern computer.
Babbage applied himself to the design of factory systems and the understanding of machine philosophy as a powerful system of logic. The issues of quality control, efficiency and productivity addressed by Babbage suggested several new (cybernetic) ideas – sequential organisation, branching and looping. These mechanisms allowed for the factory system to begin directing itself towards an optimal level of efficiency. Babbage understood that standardisation, automation, and integration, were each linked into a system of machine logic…nowadays, we think of all this in terms of the algorithm.
The Modern Machine-Ensemble
I’ve used the term machine-ensemble, to describe the integration of machine and organisation into a system, described above. The machine-ensemble is a term, first coined by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in relation to the 19C railway system. The term recognises the scale, scope and speed of machine integration so that the systemic and mechanical workings of the whole are given expression through this term. As the term suggests, it’s a group of connected machines of different sorts. The whole thing is a network system that becomes a meta-machine.
You can get a clear sense of what Schivelbusch means by looking at the integrated railway timetables for Europe. The parts all work in relation to each other. Nowadays, it’s not just trains though; it’s trains, boats, planes, cars. and people. Each moving as part of a huge and co-ordinated ensemble.
The machine-ensemble concept develops an earlier idea of the human body as a form of precise clockwork…and applies the same form of mechanical precision across a much greater field…observation and logic reveal cause-and-effect in terms of consistent and general rules.
The speed of the machine ensemble is not constant…it’s accelerating. We can trace the acceleration of modern life through stages of foot, horse, railway, and internal combustion. Later, there are jet powered, solid-state and digital stages. Each of these technologies provides the basis for a step-change, or quantum advance, in the speed of everything. Interestingly, the acceleration of the machine-ensemble also produces its own image culture that speeds up to keep pace. In turn, we learn to see the world in a new accelerated form.
How we engage (safely) with the machine-ensemble is a matter of public health…requiring: rules, discipline, courtesy and education.
Economy Democracy and Moral Standards
In its early phase, the industrial revolution was a slightly distant and separate thing from the London political elite. By the 1830s, the success of the industrialists, their wealth, power and influence had made them significant for the political elite. The northern industrial base was assimilated, along with its values of self-help, free-trade and co-operation, through the Great Reform Act (1832).
The brutally normative physical structures of school, prison and factory were augmented by a series of cognitive and conceptual standardisations. These were implemented during a remarkable period after about 1840. The new social structures include the standard one-penny letter rate, the standardisation of train timetables by Bradshaw, and the elaboration of consistent engineering norms by Whitworth. Patrick Joyce has written about the historical development of these normative standards in relation to the sociology of the industrial city, and as a kind of utopia.
Exclusion and Enclosure
The brutality and paranoia associated with the normative structures of Enlightenment society fostered a powerful sense of righteousness and anxiety amongst the population and its administration. Contrary to the expression of Enlightenment ideals, the new republics exercised a regime of brutal exclusion based principally of race and gender; and derived from the consideration of people as property assets.
Gender
From the first, women were excluded from many aspects of society. In part, this was based on their status as a form of valuable reproductive property that required protection. In practice, the exclusion of women from economic activity tended towards a form of control. The coersive power of traditional social structures provide for a form of cultish control deriving from psychological and physical violence (metoo).
Within the context of society as an economic construct it was clearly illogical to exclude women (50pc of the population) from gainful economic autonomy. Nevertheless, female autonomy has been consistently contested throughout as women balanced the conflicting demands made upon their persons in the name of productivity; whether a matter of biological destiny, or of economic production.
The founding texts of feminism begin with Mary Wollstonecroft’s, Vindication (1792). More recently, first, second and third-wave feminists have explored the wide variety of ways in which women are excluded.
Ethnicity
For all of the idealist rhetoric of the founding documents of the US republic, the reality was that the US was conceived as a slave state. In these circumstances, the evident duplicity and cynicism attaching to claims of equality undermined the project of expansion across the continent. The American Civil War should have resolved these issues, but racial segregation continued unto the 1960s.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s attempted to end the exclusion, based on race, of African-Americans. The civil rights movement developed around two main figures; Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. King’s approach was one of lawful negotiation with the Administration with peaceful demonstration. Malcolm understood the impossibility of a negotiated settlement and advocated a withdrawal of African-American into an alternative political community.
Malcolm believed, because of his experience, that this could only be achieved within the frame of a different religious philosophy. Accordingly, he advocated re-positioning African-America within the Nation of Islam grouping.
At the same time, a group of west-coast radicals had begun to understand that neither of these approaches would be immediate or powerful enough to deal with the daily harassments suffered by African-Americans in modern America. The Black Panthers proposed a formed of community organisation based on armed defence against the relentless aggression of the authorities.
None of these strategies was successful. King was assassinated. Malcolm was assassinated. The members of the Panthers were ruthlessly hunted and assassinated. Furthermore, during the 1960s, the US military escalated its foreign war in Vietnam. The reality of that conflict was that a disproportionate number of young, African-American, soldiers were sent to the most dangerous combat zones…
The Panthers were right. The basis of the African-American exclusion, in the US, was structural. Their calls for a revolutionary struggle against those structures could never have been allowed to succeed. Fifty years on and notwithstanding African-American success in sports, culture and politics; the supporting structures of racial exclusion in the US are still, broadly, in place
The Poor and the Other
In the US, the legacies of slavery have framed the African-American struggle against exclusion in a particularly tragic way. It’s worth remembering that women and African-Americans are not the only groups excluded from the Enlightenment system, in its US version.
The poor of all races are routinely excluded from the system. As are any groups identified as other to the WASP (white anglo-saxon protestants) elite.
In the 19C the westward expansion of the US across the North American continent, based on a doctrine of manifest destiny, allowed for the destruction of the local native-American populations.
Enclosure and Commons
The concept of commons describes the world in its natural state, and where and everyone has access to the resources they need. The idea is associated with a simple form of society in which property rights are not yet established. In principle, the concept acknowledges that there is enough resource for everyone; if only we organise ourselves correctly.
The brutal and systemic exclusion of whole groups of people, itemized above, has been matched by a ruthless policy of appropriation through enclosure, based on property rights attaching to the rich and powerful and awarded as political favour. This has tended to target land and resources held in common ownership and is a process that is almost as ancient as human history.
In Britain, the victorious William the Conqueror distributed lands to his military commanders. These ancient figures form the basis for the English aristocracy who still hold power based on their ancient title to lands, and resources.
Gerrard Winstanley, the British 17C radical, advocated an early form of community ownership. He founded communities in Weybridge, in Surrey, called the Diggers, or Levellers. In France, PJ Proudhom declared that, property is theft (1840).
The 17C enclosure of farmlands has been followed by the appropriation of resources in the guise of expansion through Empire.
Nowadays, even the internet has been enclosed by a small number of legally conceptualised gateway applications…
Conclusion
It’s obvious that, as I mentioned earlier, economic organisation plays a key role in how exclusion and enclosure work together to undermine the utopian idealism of Enlightenment thinking. In fact, it’s almost impossible (or has been to date) to address the structural contradictions between the rhetoric of Enlightenment and its practical economic consequences for people and the environment, across the world.
Order without power is how PJ Proudhon described his vision for the human collective. Most commentators have identified this a form of anarchism deriving from Winstanley and Godwin. Politicians often confuse anarchy with chaos.
Just recently, the internet and its spokespeople have proposed that their technology, especially in its social-media formats, could provide the basis for a new revolution in social relations. Whether the paradigm-shifting potential of the internet can survive legalistic attacks based on property rights is still unresolved.
It’s obvious, I think, that things need to change (a lot) so that our systems and structures better reflect the idealistic rhetoric of Enlightenment thinking. We can begin by being nicer to each other and by treating others with the dignity we demand for ourselves.
That’s a work of design…
Foundation Texts
The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements have given contemporary form to issues and debates that seem, depressingly, to have been a constant throughout human history. But, that shouldn’t make us doubt that social progress is possible and that, whatever we feel about the world, things are getting better. This is really important in the field of design, where what we imagine today can become the reality of the future…
The Foundation Texts, listed below, do several things. The they work back from where we are, today, and by their ordering suggest the historical developments and personalities that have framed the big social movements of today.
In identifying these documents, we’ve tried to move beyond the traditional sense of text. We’ve chosen books, speeches, song lyrics, films, and the images of my slide shows. We believe that each of these documents provides a text that can be interpreted in relation to its historical context and in terms of what it means today…it’s about zooming-out and making connections, as much as understanding the detail.
Context is often about reading films and watching magazines; in addition to the more usual watching films and reading magazines…
Modern society was founded on the 18C philosophical Enlightenment. This movement applied the methodology of the natural sciences and empiricism – observation, measurement and classification – to the political and social organisation of society. The 18C radicals quickly understood that the foundation of a just human society was equality. They elaborated this as a set of rights that applied universally to everyone, regardless of age, gender, class or race. These universal rights are described in the documents of the American constitution, Bill of Rights, (1776) and in the those of the French Republic (1789). In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine described the self-evidently rational organisation of society as a democratic and peaceful republic founded on equal rights and attendant responsibilities before the law.
The self-evident good-sense of these proposals was contested from the first. Paine (1791) observed that the vested interests and status-quo of the established order sometimes required violent encouragement to change.
The idealistic movements for the emancipation of women, the end of child labour, and the abolition of slavery, are each rooted in this period from the late-18C idealism. As suggested by Paine, it took a long time for the natural orders of society to be loosened. It was only with the massive expansion of University education, with the attendant expansion of the social sciences in particular, and with their agenda of scientific social critique, that things began to change…
The 1960s counter-culture, in the US and across the world, began to understand that the enduring problems of equality and emancipation, dignity and identity, were not simply issues of individual responsibility; they were systemic and structural.
The founding fathers of the Black Panthers (1966): Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael, understood the institutions of the state as fundamentally and structurally oppressive. Exactly like Winstanley, Godwin and Proudhon before.
The starting point for my talks has been
This is America (Childish Gambino 2018)
Now, there is
Dream Crazier (Serena Williams Nike 2019)
You can get a sense of how we got to this point by watching TV…
History of Utopia
In Search of the Dream (BBC4TV 2017)
History of the Hippies
The Summer of Love: How Hippies changed the World (BBC4TV 2017)
Slavery
Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (BBC4TV 2017)
Technology and Society
All watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC4TV Adam Curtis 2011)
And, look at these early picture stories…
Herge’s Adventures of Tin Tin
Land of the Soviets (1929)
America (1930)
Congo (1931)
Exclusion – Gender and Race
Music
Gender
RESPECT (Areatha Franklin 1967)
Your Revolution (Sarah Jones 1999)
Race
Mississippi Goddam (Nina Simone 1964)
Let em In (Billy Paul 1977)
Film
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975)
Dream Crazier (Serena Williams 2019)
When they See Us (Ava di Vernay 2019 Netflix)
Words
Gender
The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir 1949)
Sex and the Single Girl (Helen Gurley Brown 1962)
The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer 1970)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freeman 1970)
Men Explain Things to Me (Rebecca Solnit 2014)
Invisible Women (Caroline Criado Perez 2019)
Race
I Have a Dream (Martin Luther King 1963)
The Ballot or the Bullet (Malcolm X 1964)
Why I’m No Longer talking to White People about Race (Reni Eddo Lodge 2017)
Enclosure – Environment and Technology
Music
Environment
Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell (1970)
Technology
Different Trains (Steve Reich 1988)
Film
Environment
Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer 1973)
China Town (Roman Polanski 1974)
History of the Congo (Dan Snow 2013)
Technology
Modern Times (Chariie Chaplin 1936)
Europa (Lars von Trier 1991)
Requiem for Detroit (Julien Temple 2010)
Word
Environment
The Day of the Trifids (John Wyndham 1951)
Silent Spring (Rachel Carson 1962)
City of Quartz (Mike Davis 1990)
Technology
The Jungle (Upton Sinclair 1904)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs 1961)
