Commonplace 101 George & Eugenics.
George took a great deal of interest in the new 'science' of sociology; much of the impetus for this came from his involvement with Frederic Harrison and the Positivists.
You can't have sociology without statistics, and you can't have statistics without visual aids, and so these twin disciplines became the arena for the development of a range of systems of presentation of information - Florence Nightingale and her Crimean War Coxcomb pie charts, and the Poverty Maps of James Booth come to mind.
With advances in science seeming to be heading towards a new Golden Age of Prosperity and Happiness For All (as long as we all knew our place and kept to it!), statisticians turned their maths brains to tackling the causes of inequality - though they skipped past the evils of Capitalism to arrive at the inadequacies of the individual as being responsible for his/her failure to thrive. One debate centred on identifying traits that explained why some people were what might be termed Winners and some, Losers. Class - to George - was a marker for worth: the higher your class, the more valuable you were to society, as long as you had the right sensibility. He placed Artists very high up in this taxonomy of aesthetics, with denizens of the Nether World of London at the bottom, below the quaint 'peasants' he met on his south European wanderings, and the noble savages who played barrel organs.
In order to establish a concept of Worthiness, you need its opposite, Unworthiness, to act as your baseline. George, himself, was in a tricky position: he was born quite low down the heap, but clawed his way up, but never really ever as far as he thought was his comfort zone. He based this on, amongst other things, his annual income. He was never one to count his less monetary blessings, being a bit of a serial whinger when it came to adversity. But, one of his rock-solid core beliefs was that he embodied some quality of 'aristocracy' deep within himself, and that he was, therefore, better than the sum of his beginnings, and so, life owed him something.
George's jottings in his Commonplace Book show he was deeply interested in the new science of heredity; he makes notes based on his reading of Theophule Ribot's work: 'L'hereditie psychologique' - available here translated into English click. There are brief notes on a variety of topics - one specific entry concerns 'Idiocy', a very specific archaic term for what we now refer to as learning disability. In fact, an 'idiot' was defined (in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act) as being intellectually superior to an 'imbecile', and could function with support and would have some independent life skills, if not totally able to self-support. The category 'feeble-minded' was a person who was incapable of independent living or training for any purpose. A 'moral imbecile' was usually a young person who had been accused of behaving in sexually uninhibited ways or had committed small crimes of, for example, theft. If George's mother had thought of it, George could have been labelled a 'moral imbecile' after his Owens escapades and first marriage, and then had him institutionalised for it.
George includes what we now know to be inaccurate claims about various bits and pieces of genetics, one of which might have given him significant pause for thought: An intelligent father who has worked too hard may have a son whose faculties seem worn out. Did this prey on his mind? He wasn't what you might call a hard worker at your actual work, but he did make life difficult for himself most of the time, and did not have the inner resources to cope with most threats; he exemplified what my old mother used to refer to as 'his own worst enemy'. He believed he worked hard, because writing novels did not come easily to him. Did he ever think Walter, his first son, carried some kind of taint caused by his father's over-work? That might go some way to explaining why his bond with Walter was problematic - whereas his relationship with his second son was almost non-existent.
George has something to say about 'animal instinct', with regard to humans:
In the original man, animal instinct must have largely survived. Gradually, reason abolished it. Now-a-days, we still have instincts, for instance - that of decency, & we see how by intense reasoning about such instinct, it can be practically destroyed. George selected his first wife, Marianne aka Nell because she was an undeveloped resource ripe for his social experiment of 'civilizing' her. That she resisted his influence is always held against her, but those who think so must be of the mindset that she was inferior in some way at the outset. Of the two, Marianne seems the more stable and authentic, and, dare I say it: heroic. How George, the congenital liar-cum-jailbird wife-beating future adulterer and child abandoner, self-pitying manipulator and misogynist snob could ever feel in a position to mould another human being into what he considered to be an 'acceptable' shape, is the triumph of blind ego over commonplace reality HAHA.
George doesn't define 'decency' - does he mean knowing the difference between right and wrong? If so, then he is thinking of the learned or innate behaviour question - what is termed 'nature versus nurture' - a phrase invented by one of the nineteenth century's great statistics boffins, Francis Galton, the 'father' of eugenics.
Galton (1822-1911) was a man who had many strings to his bow click. He invented weather maps, but is probably best known for his views on heredity and for coining the term 'eugenics' - and for giving us 'nature versus nurture' as an explanation for what might most influence human traits and characteristics. Are we born a certain way or do we learn it? Galton used a variety of statistic gathering instruments including the questionnaire and the survey, and the psychometric test (which he invented), in an attempt to find an accurate way to assess intelligence. Now, we realise intelligence is not a single state of being - there are many ways to be intelligent and it has very little to do with IQ. For proof of this, enjoy a visit here click to explore all kinds of stupid.
Of significance, perhaps, is that Galton had a mental breakdown when he was at university, so severe that he failed to finish his degree. Whether or not this affected his view of life is unclear. Did proving to be good enough obsess him? He viewed racial stereotyping as a science that could provide accurate indicators of intelligence, and, more alarmingly, of worth. For example, in 1873, he wrote to The Times to say he thought the Chinese were 'backward' because of bad leadership and that the whole race should translocate to Africa to displace the 'inferior' indigenous population. click to read a facsimile of this letter, and the spirited response from Mr Gilbert Malcolm Sproat who questioned Galton's views on African people as inferiors, because his own experience contradicted this.
In the spirit of Galton's work on intelligence, click think about the question it poses: 'Are Victorians more intelligent than us?' And fathom how they managed to verify the accuracy of the Victorians' test subjects. I am not convinced, anyway.
George's Commonplace Book entries about the comparative size of brains equating with higher or lower intelligence concerns the brains of French men - a subject I know nothing about. However, most of us women have found out in life, size isn't everything, and it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts, whatever your nationality. But, George claims the brains of Parisians, when compared between the 12th century and the 19th, had grown by 35 cubic centimetres. That would be .075 of a pound (34 grams) in weight, according to my calculations. How this sort of daft statistic is arrived at is one of the obvious flaws built in to assessing things by so-called 'systems' of data measurement and then copying them into your Commonplace Book. Who weighed those 12th century brains, recorded their findings and under what conditions were the brains stored? What about environmental factors affecting nutrition and ageing, hydration and degeneration? George also claims (still from his reading on the subject) that modern educated Parisian brains can be enlarge by as much as 80 cubic centimetres by education and heredity (and he has not yet discovered the work done on adequate nutrition and physiology, or the place of vitamins in neurone development, or mentioned any other test nationality). However, in the next entry, George mentions that education is 'the merest varnish' and a born brute will always revert to type in the end (the voice of experience there?). So brain size can't be an indicator of what George understands as 'intelligence'. Perhaps George believed that nurture counted for very little, and that nature reigned supreme. We now know it is a range of environmental factors combined with inherent traits, with the term 'environmental' covering everything that isn't heritable. Environment would include the encouragement of our family, teachers and peers in our developmental years. And good mental health in childhood, sustained by the love of parents and carers.
To be fair, Galton's ideas, and the work George is quoting is stuff from the frontier of what was known as science at that time, though they seem laughable to us now. Take this one: A very rare case is that of 'heredity of influence'; where the child of a woman by a second husband resembles her first husband. Has been well documented in animals. How this might happen even in animals is not outlined in the Commonplace Book, but it is dead wrong - as presumably everyone and my cat know - for how this definitely won't ever happen, click. And I don't even have a cat; it is an imaginary one, used for dramatic effect. An imaginary cat... that I keep in a box with a radioactive source click
However, these bonkers ideas serve to underline the superficial nature of much of George's self-directed study, and how certain key notions he holds can be completely wrong, wonky science. Take this one:
Seeing that the man of highest refinement has so many points of contact with the savage, & even with the animal, how can we expect even average civilization of those beneath the average in brain and culture? Now, where he's gone wrong here, is ... well, you figure it out! Have a look at this to get the brain thing into shape click.
Lastly, George's daftest entry, totally unsullied by any insight into the workings of his own mind:
One cause of national degradation, now-a-days, is the success of medicine in keeping alive the unfit. The man with the chronic hypochondriasis, who would neck any remedy going, and who spent a good deal of time consulting doctors, and who was a martyr to the man flu could think this? Give me strength!
George took a great deal of interest in the new 'science' of sociology; much of the impetus for this came from his involvement with Frederic Harrison and the Positivists.
You can't have sociology without statistics, and you can't have statistics without visual aids, and so these twin disciplines became the arena for the development of a range of systems of presentation of information - Florence Nightingale and her Crimean War Coxcomb pie charts, and the Poverty Maps of James Booth come to mind.
 |
| One of Miss Nightingale's 'Coxcomb' Charts of 1858 Here, emphatically demonstrating that disease killed more soldiers than war wounds. |
In order to establish a concept of Worthiness, you need its opposite, Unworthiness, to act as your baseline. George, himself, was in a tricky position: he was born quite low down the heap, but clawed his way up, but never really ever as far as he thought was his comfort zone. He based this on, amongst other things, his annual income. He was never one to count his less monetary blessings, being a bit of a serial whinger when it came to adversity. But, one of his rock-solid core beliefs was that he embodied some quality of 'aristocracy' deep within himself, and that he was, therefore, better than the sum of his beginnings, and so, life owed him something.
 |
| The Cholmondeley Women c 1600 Artist unknown. Spot the difference. |
George includes what we now know to be inaccurate claims about various bits and pieces of genetics, one of which might have given him significant pause for thought: An intelligent father who has worked too hard may have a son whose faculties seem worn out. Did this prey on his mind? He wasn't what you might call a hard worker at your actual work, but he did make life difficult for himself most of the time, and did not have the inner resources to cope with most threats; he exemplified what my old mother used to refer to as 'his own worst enemy'. He believed he worked hard, because writing novels did not come easily to him. Did he ever think Walter, his first son, carried some kind of taint caused by his father's over-work? That might go some way to explaining why his bond with Walter was problematic - whereas his relationship with his second son was almost non-existent.
 |
| Las Meninas by Francisco Goya 1656 |
In the original man, animal instinct must have largely survived. Gradually, reason abolished it. Now-a-days, we still have instincts, for instance - that of decency, & we see how by intense reasoning about such instinct, it can be practically destroyed. George selected his first wife, Marianne aka Nell because she was an undeveloped resource ripe for his social experiment of 'civilizing' her. That she resisted his influence is always held against her, but those who think so must be of the mindset that she was inferior in some way at the outset. Of the two, Marianne seems the more stable and authentic, and, dare I say it: heroic. How George, the congenital liar-cum-jailbird wife-beating future adulterer and child abandoner, self-pitying manipulator and misogynist snob could ever feel in a position to mould another human being into what he considered to be an 'acceptable' shape, is the triumph of blind ego over commonplace reality HAHA.
George doesn't define 'decency' - does he mean knowing the difference between right and wrong? If so, then he is thinking of the learned or innate behaviour question - what is termed 'nature versus nurture' - a phrase invented by one of the nineteenth century's great statistics boffins, Francis Galton, the 'father' of eugenics.
Galton (1822-1911) was a man who had many strings to his bow click. He invented weather maps, but is probably best known for his views on heredity and for coining the term 'eugenics' - and for giving us 'nature versus nurture' as an explanation for what might most influence human traits and characteristics. Are we born a certain way or do we learn it? Galton used a variety of statistic gathering instruments including the questionnaire and the survey, and the psychometric test (which he invented), in an attempt to find an accurate way to assess intelligence. Now, we realise intelligence is not a single state of being - there are many ways to be intelligent and it has very little to do with IQ. For proof of this, enjoy a visit here click to explore all kinds of stupid.
Of significance, perhaps, is that Galton had a mental breakdown when he was at university, so severe that he failed to finish his degree. Whether or not this affected his view of life is unclear. Did proving to be good enough obsess him? He viewed racial stereotyping as a science that could provide accurate indicators of intelligence, and, more alarmingly, of worth. For example, in 1873, he wrote to The Times to say he thought the Chinese were 'backward' because of bad leadership and that the whole race should translocate to Africa to displace the 'inferior' indigenous population. click to read a facsimile of this letter, and the spirited response from Mr Gilbert Malcolm Sproat who questioned Galton's views on African people as inferiors, because his own experience contradicted this.
 |
| The motto on the left is 'I only know what I know'. |
George's Commonplace Book entries about the comparative size of brains equating with higher or lower intelligence concerns the brains of French men - a subject I know nothing about. However, most of us women have found out in life, size isn't everything, and it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts, whatever your nationality. But, George claims the brains of Parisians, when compared between the 12th century and the 19th, had grown by 35 cubic centimetres. That would be .075 of a pound (34 grams) in weight, according to my calculations. How this sort of daft statistic is arrived at is one of the obvious flaws built in to assessing things by so-called 'systems' of data measurement and then copying them into your Commonplace Book. Who weighed those 12th century brains, recorded their findings and under what conditions were the brains stored? What about environmental factors affecting nutrition and ageing, hydration and degeneration? George also claims (still from his reading on the subject) that modern educated Parisian brains can be enlarge by as much as 80 cubic centimetres by education and heredity (and he has not yet discovered the work done on adequate nutrition and physiology, or the place of vitamins in neurone development, or mentioned any other test nationality). However, in the next entry, George mentions that education is 'the merest varnish' and a born brute will always revert to type in the end (the voice of experience there?). So brain size can't be an indicator of what George understands as 'intelligence'. Perhaps George believed that nurture counted for very little, and that nature reigned supreme. We now know it is a range of environmental factors combined with inherent traits, with the term 'environmental' covering everything that isn't heritable. Environment would include the encouragement of our family, teachers and peers in our developmental years. And good mental health in childhood, sustained by the love of parents and carers.
To be fair, Galton's ideas, and the work George is quoting is stuff from the frontier of what was known as science at that time, though they seem laughable to us now. Take this one: A very rare case is that of 'heredity of influence'; where the child of a woman by a second husband resembles her first husband. Has been well documented in animals. How this might happen even in animals is not outlined in the Commonplace Book, but it is dead wrong - as presumably everyone and my cat know - for how this definitely won't ever happen, click. And I don't even have a cat; it is an imaginary one, used for dramatic effect. An imaginary cat... that I keep in a box with a radioactive source click
However, these bonkers ideas serve to underline the superficial nature of much of George's self-directed study, and how certain key notions he holds can be completely wrong, wonky science. Take this one:
Seeing that the man of highest refinement has so many points of contact with the savage, & even with the animal, how can we expect even average civilization of those beneath the average in brain and culture? Now, where he's gone wrong here, is ... well, you figure it out! Have a look at this to get the brain thing into shape click.
Lastly, George's daftest entry, totally unsullied by any insight into the workings of his own mind:
One cause of national degradation, now-a-days, is the success of medicine in keeping alive the unfit. The man with the chronic hypochondriasis, who would neck any remedy going, and who spent a good deal of time consulting doctors, and who was a martyr to the man flu could think this? Give me strength!
 |
| click for more. I would add the concept of the 'soul' to this parade of tosh. |
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