Horny Holy Man or Sinless Socialist?
by Not Sure
26 November 2023
In part two
of a 2009 film for Prison Planet, The Neo-Eugenics War on Humanity, Alan
Watt talked about the very old eugenics plan to reduce the world's population,
to get rid of useless eaters with "junk genes." He discussed the Club of Rome book, The
First Global Revolution, where we can find a quote that Alan often cited,
"The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy
to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global
warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed
attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is
humanity itself." In this
dense talk, Alan touched on the dropping sperm count, Bisphenol A, the polio
vaccine, SV40 and cancer, and eugenics breeding programs.
We think of
“modern” eugenics as an idea developed by Francis Galton, to improve the human
population by selective breeding, an idea inspired by Darwinism and natural
selection. Alan often pointed out the
faith one needed to believe in the religion born from the theory of evolution. Breeding to achieve desired results is an
ancient practice. Plato suggested that
selective mating could produce a “guardian class.” The idea and the practice did not need
Darwin, though his theory certainly underpinned the sweeping programs and
research which went into effect in 20th century Great Britain and
the United States, which were studied and replicated in Hitler’s Germany. Alan reminded us often enough that after the
bad reputation the practices received during World War II, the study and its
implantation were simply rebranded as “bioethics,” “neuroscience,” “gene
therapy,” “cloning,” “biotechnology,” “human genetic engineering,” et cetera.
Alan also
often referred to scientists as the new priesthood, so it is interesting to
consider the religious uses of sex and breeding. As with anything we weren’t on hand to
witness, temple prostitution or “sacred” prostitution remains something that
historians can debate, but if a religion featured a fertility deity, it isn’t
so far-fetched to imagine the kinds of gifts those gods might enjoy.
***
I found an interesting study
published in 2020, entitled “‘We are all in the image of God’: reproductive
imaginaries and prenatal genetic testing in American Jewish communities.” Here are a few quotes, the study's authors
cited:
Grounded in the Talmudic morality of the
Jewish obligation to the next generation, Jewish genetic testing uniquely
complicates contemporary debates exploring eugenics in the DNA age.
(Porter, 2015, p.
47).
Whatever Jewish
families do, they are in the business of inclusion and exclusion – and the
exclusions, more often than not, are done silently.
(Boyarin, 2013, p. 3).
The question
arises, when do you stop? There are close to 90 genes you wouldn’t want to
have. Will this lead to people showing each other computer print-outs
of their genetic conditions? We’ll never get married.
(Tendler, quoted in
Porter, 2015, p. 46).
The authors
write, “What happens when some American Jewish communities refashion assisted
reproductive technology (ART) to meet the concerns and aspirations of their particular cultural worlds within the US national context?
How do their distinctive practices and imaginaries enter into
specific cultural circuits that reframe key terms of their reproductive
imaginary? Our ethnographic research on the intersections of disability, ART and religion – in this case, among American Ashkenazi
Jews – offers complex and revelatory answers to these questions.
Our work reveals two sometimes contradictory frameworks. The
first is the enthusiastic uptake of genetic testing by and for American
Ashkenazi Jews to prevent the birth of babies with hereditary disorders. This
practice has been increasing across all sectors of the Jewish community where
genetic diseases run at a relatively elevated rate.”
***
James Dobson is an evangelical
Christian psychologist and author, who started Focus on the Family (FotF) to promote conservative “family values” in
America. The values Dobson promoted
included heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, and he warned against
homosexuality and feminism. He was
instrumental in shaping some of the “Religious Right” programs that energized a
huge voter base to support Ronald Reagan and subsequent leaders in American
conservative politics. Dobson worked for
seventeen years on the staff of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles in the
Division of Child Development and Medical Genetics. He started his writing career as an assistant
to Paul Popenoe, “an American marriage counselor, eugenicist, and agricultural
explorer. He was an influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of mentally
ill people and people with mental disabilities, and the father of marriage
counseling in the United States.”
Because of the damage to the
reputation of eugenics, Popenoe moved his focus from pure eugenics into
marriage counseling. His approach aimed
to produce “fit” marriages, with no miscegenation, chastity before marriage,
and sexual education for the couple. Though
the reasons for his work in marriage counseling were eugenical (he desired to
help white families stay together and produce offspring,) he increasingly found
himself allied with religious conservatives, including Dobson. Eugenics and Christianity, evangelical or
otherwise, are often thought of as antithetical, as these groups have typically
opposed sterilization.
***
Born in 1866, H.G. Wells coined the
term “free love.” He wrote about it and
practiced it. Married twice, with
several long-term affairs, and many shorter ones, Wells has been called a
predatory seducer. But alas, Wells was
not the first proponent or practitioner of screwing around for the sake of
Utopia.
John Humphrey Noyes was born in 1811
in Vermont, the son of a man who was at times a minister, a teacher, a
businessman, and a U.S. congressman. His
mother was the aunt of Rutherford B. Hayes, which made Noyes the cousin of a
U.S. President. Noyes was a preacher, a
radical philosopher and the founder of the Oneida Community, a socialist
utopian society. He is credited with
coining the term “complex marriage.” A
complex marriage is a form of polygamy.
Everyone is married to everyone.
Noyes graduated from Dartmouth
College and then entered Yale Theological Seminary where he trained to become a
preacher. He became increasingly
interested in salvation from sin. “He began to argue with his colleagues that
unless man was truly free of sin, then Christianity was a lie, and that only
those who were perfect and free of sin were true Christians. This internal
religious crisis brought about a new religious conversion within Noyes, after
which he began to proclaim that he ‘did not sin.’” Noyes became a big advocate of Christian
perfectionism, the idea that it is possible to be free of sin in this
lifetime. He believed that his new
relationship with God canceled his obligation to live by traditional moral
standards or the laws of society. Some
similarities to the Crowley/Thelemic/sex magick “Do
as thou wilt is the whole of the Law” idea.
Sometime after becoming perfect and
sinless, Noyes got married. His wife
gave birth five times and four of those were premature. (Perhaps she wasn’t perfect?) This led Noyes to begin his study of sexual
intercourse within marriage. In the
eighth year of his marriage, Noyes became sexually attracted to the wife of a
new Christian convert, George Cragin. “He
persuaded the Cragins and Mrs. Noyes to merge their
unions into a “complex marriage,” in which both men were married to both women,
such that they could have sex together. The two couples moved into a common house that
same year.” What the Noyeses
and the Cragins did could be described as “wife
swapping” or “swinging” but John Noyes called it “complex,” him being perfect
and all.
If this is an area of study you’d
like to dive into, much has been written about the little socialist utopia that
Noyes started in upstate New York, the Oneida Community. You can read about “male continence” and how
at the post-menopausal women of the Community would train the young boys into
the techniques of continence. No chance
of pregnancy that way. Noyes maintained
strict control over who could mate with whom. He called the planned conception, birth and
rearing of children “stirpiculture.” His
aims were not for physical attributes, but for spiritual perfection. Naturally.
Two books I’ve read on Noyes and the
Oneida Community are Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community
and The Ministers’ War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community, and the
Crusade for Public Morality, but you can get a decent overview of this
story by a quick read of Noyes’ Wiki entry.
What always struck me about this bit
of American socialist history was that it was allowed to occur at all. Some parents of young women who joined the
communal living at Oneida were outraged.
One father protested outside the “Mansion” for two years. Noyes was well connected, and his thirty-year
experiment would have been closely watched.
The timing is off for H.G. Wells to have visited, but there is no doubt
that he was influenced by Oneida in his writing and his own experiments. Another element that speaks to a level of
organization higher than a fringe commune were the business enterprises that the
Oneida Community started and maintained.
They manufactured and sold the Oneida steel trap which became the
industry standard in the fur trade. They
also started what is now known as Oneida Limited, a manufacturer of silverware
and silver-plated cutlery. For much of
the twentieth century, it was the largest producer of flatware in the world.
In June of 1879, Noyes received word
that he was about to be arrested for statutory rape. He fled the U.S. to Ontario, Canada where the
Oneida Community had a factory. In
August, he wrote to his followers that it was time to end the practice of
complex marriage and live more traditionally.
In January of 1881, the Community was dissolved and turned into a joint stock
company. Noyes died in Niagara Falls, Canada
in 1886. His son Pierrepont consolidated
all the Community’s business enterprises into Oneida Limited. During the First World War, Pierrepont worked
for the Federal Government as Assistant Fuel Administrator. In May of 1919, he became the American
Commissioner on the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission to “ensure, by any
means, the security and satisfaction of all the needs of the Armies of
Occupation.” Rubbing shoulders with
Woodrow Wilson and Bernard Baruch as the Treaty of Versailles was worked out
and all the plum assignments secured. In
1930, Pierrepont was asked by Baruch to join a six-man commission set up by the
New York State Legislature to develop a new spa at Saratoga Springs, something
long dreamed of by Baruch’s father. In
its day, the Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga Springs was the largest hotel in the
world. Pierrepont Noyes remained on the
commission until 1950. I suppose we can
call Pierrepont Noyes “a eugenics experiment that turned out well.”
© Not Sure
Additional reading:
‘We are all in the image of God’: reproductive imaginaries
and prenatal genetic testing in American Jewish communities
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7476807/
John Humphrey Noyes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Humphrey_Noyes
A Strange Liberation: Women and Male Continence in the Oneida
Community
https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/1183
Heirs to the Promised Land: The Children of Oneida
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23027174
The Oneida Community Moves to the OC
https://daily.jstor.org/oneida-community-moves-oc/
H.G. Wells, Prophet of Free Love
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/11/hg-wells-david-lodge