How The Enlightenment Led To Contraception (And Other Forms of Anti-Natal Behavior)

We continue our leisurely and in-depth study of the works of David Stove. We’re still with his book On Enlightenment. This article is long, so if you’re short of time, skip to the end to the last segment on egalitarianism. Copy and paste this for others.

Stove opens his essay “The Diabolical Place: A Secret of the Enlightenment” with as succinct a description of the Enlightenment as you can find, framing it in nice logical terms, and showing us the three main diseases from which we suffer.

It was always obvious enough what the main axioms of the Enlightenment were. They were secularism, egalitarianism, and the utilitarian axiom, that the test of morality is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Many of the theorems too, which evidently followed from one or more of those axioms, were well recognized all along: such theorems, I mean, as republicanism and anticlericalism. Certain other theorems, for example universal suffrage, took a long time to be recognized as theorems of the Enlightenment, even by the Enlightened themselves. But there was one theorem which the Enlightened, though they recognized that it followed from their axioms, felt obliged to keep secret from the public for more than a hundred and fifty years, and which remained almost unmentionable until the lifetime of many people who are still living today [recalling this essay was writtn.

Remembering the tendency since the Enlightenment for things to be named for their opposite, including the name of the movement itself, the theorem he means is birth control. Which means, of course, birth prevention.

The three main ways of birth prevention, when the sexual act or its simulation are involved, are killing the lives inside would-be mothers or soon after they escape the womb, perversity and dissoluteness, and contraception. The first also has an opposite name: reproductive healthcare, which is two opposites in one. The second is flipped, too, in celebration of a well-known sin. And the last is our subject.

Stove reminds us “birth control” was only coined in 1914, and contraception three years after. Yet contraception is easily proved to flow from Enlightenment axioms:

Secularism condemns marriage vows, along with all other vows, oaths, and promises, as being relics of superstition. The greatest happiness axiom condemns clerical (and almost any other) celibacy. For these reasons, the Enlightenment had always promised an immense future increase in sexual gratification. But universal sexual emancipation, on its own, would be sure to have an effect directly contrary to “the greatest happiness”: namely, too many hungry or unhealthy or neglected children.

While this follows, most arguments for contraception today are convenience-based, people not wanting to be “burdened” by the natural results of their sexual activity, with little or no regard to lives of the children created (hence abortion and adoption). Or people say they cannot “afford” children, with arguments there devolving into the desultory economics of healthcare.

Stove makes the case that the instigators of the Enlightenment, like Condorcet and William Godwin, knew birth prevention was the natural concomitant to sexual “liberation”, but kept silent on it, the idea being then too appalling to admit.

Enter Anglican clergyman Thomas Malthus, who, Stove argues elsewhere, is widely misunderstood today. About that, another time. What is true, however is that Malthus argued that the “human population, at any rate among the poor, always increases up to the limit permitted by the available supply of food.” In pre-contraception, pre-abortion days, Malthus’ solution was to have the poor marry late, which would limit their increase.

But “utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and their numerous and influential followers…drew from that same proposition a practical conclusion very different from Malthus’: namely, that the poor should be taught the necessity, and the methods, of contraception”. And “This group of people soon came to be called ‘neo-Malthusians,’ a name which naturally (and rightly) distressed Malthus”, because of his Christian faith.

It seems impossible to believe now, but contraception was once seen as opprobrious:

But the neo-Malthusians had another public relations problem even more serious than that of their name, for while they were convinced of the urgent necessity of contraception, they were too frightened to say so in public. They considered themselves already embattled enough, simply from being utilitarians, and therefore suspected (rightly) of republicanism, irreligion, etc. For them to advocate and teach contraception in public would have meant incomparably greater odium still. There had been no precedent for such an enormity in fifteen Christian centuries, not even among the wildest men of the French Revolution; and the neo-Malthusian thinkers were hardly the people to break such a silence.

It wasn’t until 1825 when a commoner named Place published graphic guides to contraception in Richard Carlile’s magazine The Republican.

These publications produced a violent reaction, but it was not a public outcry: the shock went rather too deep for that. You could better call it an incry: a silent spasm of pain which ran through the country. Someone described Place’s handbill as “diabolical,” and this word caught on, and stuck to the handbills and to Place: no doubt because it accurately expressed what most decent people felt about such publications…

Are you inclined to smile at that feeling? Well, it is not illegal now to urinate on your parents’ graves, say, or to collect photographs of your daughter’s face and stick pins through the eyes. These things, and a million others, are not forbidden by the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, either. But what would be the feelings of decent people towards someone who did them?

Stove asked that, what he thought was a rhetorical, question before the Great Awokening. All manner of these things are now “stunning and brave” and “transgressive”, all are hailed, praised, awarded, especially when they are done in the name of Art. All of which shows that once the Enlightenment burns through a Chesterton gate, there is nothing to prevent the fire from spreading.

At any rate, such was the horror of Place’s ideas that it wasn’t until half a century later that a Bristol bookshop reissued a contraception pamphlet, now with graphic illustrations. The seller was arrested, tried, convicted, and had the conviction later over-turned.

It has often been represented as a great victory for contraception; some people have even attributed to it a decline in the British birthrate which began at about the same time. But as far as I can discover, it was no propaganda triumph, rather the reverse. The defendants seem to have antagonized virtually everyone, including many people whom they had hoped to find, or to make, their allies. There was one especially telling instance of this.

This was Charles Darwin, whom the booksellers hoped would testify on their behalf.

Charles Darwin was not an impolite man, but he gave Besant and Bradlaugh a very brutal brush-off. He was opposed, he told them, not merely to advocacy of contraception, but to the thing itself. As Besant later reported, “he disagreed with preventive checks to population, on the ground that over-multiplication was useful, since it caused a struggle for existence in which only the strongest and the ablest survived, and that he doubted whether it was possible for preventive checks to serve as well as positive.” Nor was this a case of Darwin rationalizing the distaste which he evidently felt for the defendants: he had expressed the same thought in print some years before, not indeed so brutally, but clearly enough, in The Descent of Man (1871).

Darwin was therefore an accelerationist, of a kind. Modern medicine, to the extent it heals instead of enslaves, works against this acceleration. As one of many for instances, we read last week of some new mechanical contrivance that assists wounded and broken sperm to make their way to eggs. Except for the hubris of scientists who cannot resist playing with their toys, I can think of no good reason for this. But perhaps you, dear reader, can. Let us know.

It took until 1921 for the first contraception clinics to open in London. Think of these like inverted Soylent factories. This was the real beginning of people turning against the Reality of their own biology in earnest. We all see where we are now with preposterosities like “gender transitions”. What could be next? Well, the norming of all possible sex-like activity, as we have seen. The other side is transhumanism in general, including the hope of “designer” babies.

Now today I won’t go into the scientific side of that, because it would take us too far afield; suffice it to say that over-certainty is as rampant here as in most fields.

However, it is clear that with Margaret Sanger and other contraceptionists the original version of designer babies was high in their minds.

The eugenics movement had been begun in the 1880s by Darwin’s cousin and friend, Sir Francis Galton, who also coined the word “eugenics.” The movement was later carried on under the energetic leadership of the biologist and statistician, Professor Karl Pearson. In theory the movement was as much concerned with “positive” eugenics, that is, breeding better people, or more of them, as it was with “negative”: breeding less of the worse. But in practice, naturally enough, it was negative eugenics which soon assumed overwhelming importance in the eugenists’ eyes.

There’s a lot of heavy breathing, which even I unthinkingly in my younger days joined in, on the subject of eugenics, which may also be called good breeding. All of us in picking our mates engage in good breeding, in eugenics as the term originally meant. This cannot be stopped.

What might be stopped is bad breeding, discouraging others to breed. Dysgenics is intolerable to those in sway to egalitarianism, even though it is practiced by all, to a small extent, by rejecting as mates those who do not meet our standards. Yet Equality demands that all are equal, and no preference of any kind may be noted in traits (except we are all allowed to condemn white men). Hence we have people saying it is “transphobic” for men not to date men pretending to be women.

The real objection, to me, is not that the bad is to be preferred because there is no bad and no good, it is the notion that all should be watched over and guided by officials or Experts. Any bureaucratic program to encourage eugenics, or discourage dysgenics, would turn into yet another scientific boondoggle. I’ll leave proof of that for another day.

At any rate, it is easy to see that “the movement for fewer children became a movement for better ones, and for racially better ones in particular.” Marie Stopes, a contemporary of Sanger, in her Contraception said:

The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from less children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back of that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.

Both pressures exist today, but the eugenists (the word here being used in its original sense) are losing the birth battle because of at least contraception, and dysgenics is wholly unacceptable because Equality. Hence the inevitable hopeful turn towards artificial means, such as transhumanism and “gene editing” for babies. I mean their hope, and am not predicting success.

Last Word On Equality

Fittingly, Stove closes out this essay with yet another disquisition on Equality:

Egalitarianism, as I said at the beginning, was an axiom of the Enlightenment. But if human beings are in themselves all equal, it follows that the inequalities and other differences which we actually find among them must all be due to external causes: to variable accidents, such as their social position, education, wealth, and so on…

Call this Enlightenment theorem “externalism.” From externalism, along with the undeniable fact that past education, past forms of government, etc. were such as to leave indefinite room for improvement, a further
theorem follows: that all that is needed, to bring about indefinite future improvement in human beings, is improvement in their education, form of government, and so on. This is the Enlightenment theorem of “perfectibilism,” as they used to call it; but I will call it “educationism,” since that name seems to me both more expressive and less embarrassing.

Here is the kicker, which I wish could be repeated for all to see.

The egalitarian axiom, and its theorems of externalism and educationism, are all obviously false, and always were so. Or rather, to speak plainly, they are and always were simply ridiculous. How could any sane parent of two or more children ever have believed that all children possess equal native endowments of mind and body, or that they will all respond in the same way to the same external circumstances?…

Francis Galton, in Hereditary Genius (1869), did valuable service against the ridiculous axiom of equality, and the ridiculous theorems derived from it. He pointed out, for example, the great differences in ability which exist even among tiny groups of exceptionally able people—for example, in the mathematical ability of the best Cambridge mathematics graduates in any given year—and which exist, a fortiori, everywhere else. And he showed, with irresistible biographical detail, how strong the tendency is for exceptional ability to be hereditary. His most memorable examples were drawn from mathematics and music: the Bach family being the most striking case of hereditary genius in music, the Bernoulli family in mathematics.

Of course, long before Galton, countless people of common sense had noticed that musical and mathematical ability are strongly hereditary. Yet that hero of the Enlightenment, Tom Paine, ridiculed the idea of an hereditary legislator, by saying that such a thing was “as absurd as an hereditary mathematician.” Nor was this an individual aberration: it accurately expressed the boundless folly and ignorance of the whole Enlightenment…

[The discoveries in biology ] “must infallibly dispel that last vestige of belief in the Enlightenment delusion of equality…But nothing of the kind has happened: in fact, quite the reverse. Equality, externalism, and educationism are the basis, now even more than ever, of all government policy in the free countries, as they have been all along, and, avowedly, in the communist ones. In the most important of our educational institutions, the Faculties of Arts, these old delusions have even assumed new forms of unprecedented absurdity and virulence. For there the feminists and the Marxists, heirs of the Enlightenment all, hold undisputed sway. There they unite to teach countless intelligent but ignorant young people that, not only ordinary differences in ability among humans, but even differences of sex, of age, of health, are all (as they like to say) “socially constituted”: nay, that death itself is only a capitalist/patriarchal “formation.”…

What is one to call such beliefs, if not “insane”?

I think this is a fine, apt word. If you have a better one, let’s hear it.

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