HUMA 1905
Dangerous Visions, Brave New Worlds:
The Science Fiction Culture and Our Scientific Age

Allan Weiss's Notes:

Contexts:

I.  The Economic and Social Background

• Exploration & Exploitation
• Imperialism
• Slavery

II. The Scientific Background

• Race in Philosophy and Science
  • Lamarck and Inherited Characteristics
  • Linnaeus and Classification
  • Enlightenment Views of Race
    • Emmanuel Kant
    • David Hume
  • Romantic Views of Race
    • The Grotesque: Frankenstein Once More
    • Primitivism and “Beasts”
  • Comparative Anatomy: Measuring Skulls
    • James Hunter
    • J. F. Blumenbach
    • William Lawrence
    • James C. Prichard
    • Samuel Smith
    • Georges Cuvier
  • Charles Darwin and Race
  • Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism
• Eugenics
  • Frances Galton
  • “Hereditary Talent and Character” (1865)
  • Hereditary Genius (1869)
  • F. C. S. Schiller: Positive and Negative Eugenics
  • Ludwig Gumplowicz, Race and State (1875)
  • Degeneration Revisited: Max Nordau, H. G. Wells, etc.
  • Charles Davenport
  • American Eugenics Society
  • Eugenics Education Society
    
  • Havelock Ellis
    
  • The Problem of Race-Regeneration (1911)
  •  The Task of Social Hygiene (1912)
    
  • H. G. Wells
    
  • Neville Chamberlain
  • George Bernard Shaw
  • R. R. Rentoul, Race Culture or Race Suicide? (1906
  • Lothrop Stoppard, The Rising Tide of Colour Against White-World Supremacy (1921)

Aldous Huxley:

• Biography
• Views
• Brave New World
  • Eugenics or Industrialization?
  • Utopia or Dystopia?
  • Satire and the Dystopian Novel

Review

Appreciating fairness, equality and social justice

Abolition of private property – an idea whose time keeps coming

Going all the way: Zamyatin’s abolition of interpersonal privacy

Grade sharing: a practical pedagogic experiment

What’s wrong with global sharing for a better social sandbox?

Eugenics

If eliminating every disparity from society does not suffice to bring universal happiness and eliminate human conflict -- does that mean we have to give up on utopian societies?  By no means.  Instead of redesigning more fair societies to make human beings happier and stop fighting?  Why not re-design human beings to be happier and stop fighting -- and thereby bring about more ideal utopian societies that way?

From Paul Fayter's lecture notes:

In the nineteenth century, biblical views of history as linear or teleological, aimed at a coming apocalypse, and the dawn of the "Kingdom of God" (a new world of justice, righteousness, equality, and peace) were overtaken by secular myths of scientific progress and salvation, theories of biological and social evolution, and assumptions about racial superiority--and inferiority.

H.G. Wells, whose Time Machine (1895) was an implicitly eugenic warning against biological degeneration, rejected Christianity and became a disciple of Darwinism. In his 1902 book, Anticipations of the Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (pp. 298-300), Wells envisaged a future "New Republic" in which eugenics and mass euthanasia play the same roles that they would in Hitler's "New Order":

the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world-state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity--beautiful strong bodies, clear and powerful minds....And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness...is death....The men of the New Republic...will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while.

The new "scientific ethics" of utilitarianism, taught that "the end justifies the means" so that, depending on the end (such as the "greatest happiness of the greatest number"), even the torture of children, or genocide could be seen as morally good. This naturalistic ethic was intertwined with Darwinism and its scientific offspring, eugenics and social Darwinism.

In Wells's cheery secular forecast, race war replaces the biblical vision of Armageddon. This time, however, the battle is not between good and evil, God and Satan, but between the weak and the strong, the unfit and the fit. The inferior forces of degeneration had to be conquered by the progressive powers of the racially superior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQUE2qAH6gw

Huxley: multiple utopian ideals for totalitarian social harmony

Conditioning

Fordism

Happy altered states

Social harmony, security, perhaps happiness – or uncertainty, freedom and democracy?

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