The Coming of the Biocrat: Jack London's The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel by Jack London

"Did you notice how he began like a lamb—Everhard, I mean, and how quickly he became a roaring lion? He has a splendidly disciplined mind. He would have made a good scientist if his energies had been directed that way." (23)

Originally published: 1908
Acquired: June 2021
Read: July 2021

I knew Jack London wrote a "yellow peril" invasion novel; I had not known that he also wrote a piece of revolutionary science fiction until I was reading Geoffrey Harpham's 1975 essay "Jack London and the Tradition of Superman Socialism." Harpham uses the term "superman socialist" to describe the protagonist of The Iron Heel, Ernest Everhard. According to Harpham, the superman socialist “[m]erg[ed] the vision of Just Society with the idea of the romantic hero” (23). The superman socialist has “scientific, factual bases for his sense of superiority” (24), but he “renounces Nietzschean amorality in favor of the proper use of genius in struggling for a better social order” (25). The superman socialist knows his violence is justified because a better world emerges, no matter who dies to create it; Harpham argues that superman socialism uses the same rhetoric as the forces it opposed, calling it “a barbaric American Kiplingism in which the fit survived and the unfit perished, to nobody’s regret—a view which lent itself to a sanction not only of superman socialism, but of empire and militarism as well” (26). I found the concept very useful in writing about Victorian sf novels featuring Darwinism; it seemed to me that the superman socialist was another form of what I call, drawing on Robert Lifton, the biocrat. But I used the concept so much I really felt I ought to go read The Iron Heel for myself!

I read this before H. G. Wells's two "biocratic" novels, Anticipations and A Modern Utopia, simply because I got ahold of it first, but am writing it up afterwards, which is eminently appropriate, not just because it was published later, but because Anticipations was a direct influence on London. In Anticipations, Wells coined the term "People of the Abyss" to refer to what he considered the lowest classes, those who didn't even labor. London actually used the term as the title of a 1903 memoir he wrote about life in London's East End, and he recycles the term here as well. The form of this book feels a bit Wellsian, too, in that it's told in the form of a book manuscript from the future, one written in the mid-20th century, but not published until the 27th, and it includes footnotes from a 27th-century annotator making clear the 20th-century cultural context to a 27th-century audience. Though actually I don't think Wells wrote one of those "found future manuscript" books until The Shape of Things to Come, which was almost three decades later. (The World Set Free seems like a future history book, but this isn't made explicit, and it also comes after Iron Heel.) It is a format others were using around this time; Henry Lazarus's The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century and Frank Attfield Fawkes's Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe are the two that stick out to me. Did London read these? Maybe he read something like them, or maybe he invented his own take on the idea out of whole cloth. The idea of us reading future annotations aimed at an imaginary future audience is clever, and a neat innovation of London, who in explaining what the 20th century takes for granted, makes it clear what the 27th century does not take for granted.

The whole book is thus supposedly by Avis Everhard, the wife of Ernest Everhard, one of the key participants in a failed socialist uprising; it gives Ernest's life and the uprising from her perspective. There's some neat stuff here, especially Avis's slow radicalization and her as a deep cover agent. But much of the later sections of the novel are told at a remove, so we don't actually live the events along with her, but just hear them summarized in retrospect. As a book, it's basically fine, but it does give good insight into a particular kind of early 20th-century socialist thinking, one that I am attempting to surface (albeit in Britain) in my own project. Ernest is a man who believes that only violence can reject capitalism and bring about socialism, and as Harpham says, the main characters seem to be as disgusted by the lower classes they are supposedly helping as they are by the upper classes they are in opposition to. The "superman socialist" decides who lives and who dies, and if you die in the cause of socialism, the death is justified: "It would have meant […] great loss of life, but no revolutionist hesitates at such things" (220). As my epigraph above highlights, Everhard is not—unlike how Lifton defines the biocrat, and unlike the Samurai of Wells's two utopias—a man of science or medicine, but London is keen to highlight that he thinks like a scientist, but sees with even more clarity, and this is what gives him the moral authority that he needs to commit violence.

The Coming of the Biocrat: H. G. Wells's Anticipations

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought by H. G. Wells

[F]rom its very nature, and I am writing with the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this application [i.e., forecasting]. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of fiction carries with it something of disavowal; indeed, very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents. (1-2n)

Originally published: 1901
Read: September 2021

I read this after A Modern Utopia, even though Anticipations was published first—and even though Modern Utopia is clearly an intellectual sequel to it, if not an actual one. This is because it was much easier to get a hold of A Modern Utopia (in print as part of the very comprehensive set of H. G. Wells Penguin Classics) than it was Anticipations (last reprinted, in a decent edition anyway, way back in 1999). I was grumpy and indignant upon realizing this. We might remember Wells now for his scientific romances, but those were just the first, brief phase of his career. The thing that made Wells who he was in his day was Anticipations; it launched him on a career of being a social prophet and a widely read public intellectual. Yet Penguin Classics reprinted The New Machiavelli and not this!?

Well, upon reading it, it quickly became obvious why they skipped over it. As my quotation above demonstrates, Wells did not consider this a work of fiction. Thus, it has dated quite badly in a way that most of his other work has not, not even fictionalized future histories like The Shape of Things to Come. Wells may have been following "the scientific method" in his prophecies, whatever that might mean, but though I think he was good at identifying what many of the key issues might be, he was pretty bad at identifying how they might actually play out. In the post-Trump era, his claim about demagogues looks pretty bad:

It is improbable that ever again will any flushed undignified man with a vast voice, a muscular face in incessant operation, collar crumpled, hair disordered, and arms in wild activity, talking, talking, talking, talking copiously out of the windows of railway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotel balconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits–tireless and undammable–rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic state in the world. (89)

I mean, that one was pretty much disproved within a few decades by the rise of Hitler! (But even in 1934, Wells was insisting he'd got this one right.) The book is filled with stuff like that: Wells thinks all of England will be a suburb (27), and it will be filled with lovely houses, built to order (36); that a group of scientific men will detach themselves from society and run it on rational lines (81, 86, 98, 155); that the lower classes will no longer be recruited for the military (107); that French is most likely to become the international language (134-37); that all of Western Europe will become one state (136), and all of North America, plus Scandinavia, another (146). There are long, dull passages about what houses will look like.

I mean, he's thinking about stuff no one else is really thinking about... but in a sense, he's not coming up with the right answers any more often than those who haven't thought about, even if he is asking the right questions. If you prophesy in the form of fiction, it doesn't matter if you get everything wrong, because fiction speaks to the reader no matter when they read it. No, The Sleeper Awakes did not come to pass, but I still get something out of it. But if this doesn't come to pass, there's little to get out of it.

Except, if like me, you need to know about science and morality in the long nineteenth century, because as always, Wells touches on everything. I read this book because of its discussion of the future eugenic state. Sorry, but I have to quote at length to give you the full effect:

[T]he 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 and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge–and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things....
     The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. (167-8)

Yikes.

The nicest thing you can say about all of this is that he was less racist than most people like this. He suggests that the New Republic won't exterminate nonwhites just because they are nonwhites, but that they'll just exterminate the worst of society, and thus let nonwhites prove themselves (177). And he does actually make fun of scientific racists at times (124). On the other hand, he makes the occasional anti-Semitic jab (41).

It reads more like a dystopia than a utopia, and it always stings to see Wells—surely one of the smartest men of his time—get caught up in the very biocractic thinking he skewered in The War of the Worlds. A warning that many of us do not get smarter as we get older, I suppose.

The Coming of the Biocrat: H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia

Originally published: 1904-5
Acquired and read: June 2021

A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells

Suppose then for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device [creating conditions that lead to "race suicide" from lack of reproduction] seems the least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that is to say, as we have already discussed [...], by its marriage laws, and by the laws of minimum wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive – they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. (225)

I'm no Adam Roberts, but there are few significant Wells novels that I haven't read at this point. Out of the top twenty on LibraryThing (excluding omnibus editions), I've read fifteen. With A Modern Utopia, I can bring that number up to sixteen.* I picked up A Modern Utopia and read it because of my chapter on eugenicist novels; I cap that chapter off with a reading of The War of the Worlds as an anti-eugenicist novel, so it seemed important to read Wells's later books where he advocates for eugenics. The two prominent ones were Anticipations (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1904-5), and since it was easier to get ahold of A Modern Utopia, I read it first even though it was published later.

In this book, Wells's narrator (clearly a fictionalized Wells) and a botanist friend (based, the "Note on the Text" in my Penguin edition tells me, on his friend Graham Wallas, a lecturer in political science) are spontaneously transported to Utopia, a planet exactly identical to Earth in geography and inhabitants, except that it is, well, a utopia. This allows Wells to expound what he think a utopia would look like, contrasting it against our world. So short passages about what the two characters are up to are interspersed with Wellsian discourse on an ideal society. Wells is smarter than many when it comes to thinking these kind of things through, and he wants you to know it; he highlights how he rejects the fallacies of people like Comte and Bellamy, and he recycles his joke about utopian cicerones from The Time Machine. It's all very worthy, and Wells deploys some wit, but you know, don't come here looking for another War of the Worlds or even Love and Mr Lewisham.

The key bits for me were from the section I quoted above, when Wells lays out his eugenics idea. The main thing you can say about it is that Wells is much less racist and good deal more "rational" than many of his contemporaries, and indeed, even himself back when he wrote Anticipations. After the bit I quoted above, he goes on to say probably no race is worse than any other when in utopian conditions, but we won't really know that until we've got some. English intellectual society was swimming in this stuff then, so it's not too surprising Wells couldn't see out of it, even if War of the Worlds would seem to indicate he ought to have been able to. I guess he gets further than many.

Wells does not convincingly lay out a utopia I feel like I'd actually want to live in, but then, who does?

* I haven't read The Outline of History (#6), A Short History of the World (#12), Kipps (#14, though I do own it), and Mr. Britling Sees It Through (#19). Plus there are several I have read outside of the top twenty.

Darwin and the Revolution

I am back to working on my book project, for the first time since January. (I wouldn't claim that under normal circumstances I produce copious academic work during the semester, but the exigencies of the pandemic have really cut my during-the-semester work down to nothing.) I'm revising a chapter from my dissertation about novels of political violence that feature biologists and use Darwinian rhetoric.

This chapter was a relative late add to the dissertation. In my proposal, I had a chapter that discussed three novels of political violence; this became seven novels of political violence later on. Eventually I split that up into two chapters each covering three novels, and shunted one of the novels into a different chapter. That meant the new chapter had no real framework. I think it cited a sentence apiece from two different sources in support of its claims about social Darwinism! Social Darwinism was, indeed, something I knew very little about. But, you know, a good dissertation is a done dissertation, and I marked this all down on my to-do list for revising it into a book.

Thus I have spent the past month learning about social Darwinism. It turns out that I did not know very much!

To understand social Darwinism, we don't begin with Darwin, but we actually begin in the 1950s. The term was popularized by Richard Hofstadter, a professor of history, in his book Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944). This book defined "social Darwinism" as a justification for laissez-faire ruthless capitalism, arguing that it was popular especially in America. Basically, Hofstadter's idea went, social Darwinism was the self-serving justification of people who either 1) crushed other people on their way to the top, or 2) wanted to remove all government rules preventing them from crushing people on their way to the top. These social Darwinists claimed any such crushing was the "survival of the fittest," and you couldn't say that was bad, that was how nature worked, and what it produced was, definitionally, the fittest!

A lot of people have criticized Hofstadter for a lot of reasons, but I don't know enough to assess most of of the criticisms. The one that seems particularly interesting to me is twofold. The first part is that there was no such thing as social Darwinism. What I mean by this is that the term "social Darwinism" indicates there is a difference between applying Darwinism to the biological arena and applying Darwinism to the social arena. The social arena was the biological arena. The British historian James Moore has done some strong work explaining what, in a historical sense, "Darwinism" means and how its originators meant the term. Some seek to defend Darwin by saying social Darwinism was a misapplication of his theory, but this neglects both how he devised it and how he himself used it.

For example, Moore points out in his article "Socializing Darwinism," that Darwinism was derived in part from Malthusianism, which was all about society: "Both Malthus and Darwin believed in the beneficent necessity of the laws of nature that give rise to a struggle for existence in human populations. Both believed the dictate of these laws was that individuals ought generally to enjoy the fruits of their foresight or suffer the pains of their improvidence. Both believed that the degrees of material success or failure in question are direct indications of moral worth and, as such, ought not to be mitigated" (Science as Politics, edited by Les Levidow, Free Association Books, 1986, p. 52). It was not a distinction drawn in the creation of his theory.

Diane B. Paul argues that social Darwinism "was a term that would have baffled Darwin. In Victorian England, scientists took for granted that biological facts mattered for social theory and policy" ("Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics," The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, Cambridge UP, 2009, p. 229). Similarly, according to Moore, "The routine distinction made today between 'Darwinism' and 'Social Darwinism' would have been lost on the author of the Descent of Man, and probably on most of his defenders until the 1890s” (p. 62). For Darwin and his adherents-- and detractors!-- Darwinism was social Darwinism.

(Now, there are some critics who use this to argue no one should go around using the term "social Darwinism" at all, or that it should only be used to identify a very narrow group of people who self-identified as social Darwinists. This I don't think follows. It does seem useful to have a term that describes the concept of applying evolution by natural selection to social organization even if the original Darwinists wouldn't have made that distinction themselves.)

The second part of the criticism I want to highlight follows from the first: because Darwinism was social Darwinism, everybody who was engaging with Darwin's ideas was doing it. So it wasn't just right-wingers looking to grind down competitors in Progressive-Era America who were claiming Darwinian backing, it was everyone who was interesting in making a theory of society. So as Paul points out, Darwinism was used to justify laissez faire, to justify colonialism, to justify socialism, to justify eugenics (p. 240). It was used to justify anarchism, and some anarchists even made use of eugenics, as Richard Cleminson discusses in his book Anarchism and Eugenics: An Unlikely Convergence (Manchester UP, 2019). (Some people argue eugenics is a kind of social Darwinism; some people argue very vehemently that it is not.) How could anarchists-- people who reject state control-- allow arguable the ultimate form of state control of the individual? Paul Crook's Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War (Cambridge UP, 1994) discusses how Darwin was used to justify military conflicts and became a secular source of pacifism for the "peace biologists."

I like how J. W. Burrow puts it in his book The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (Yale UP, 2000): "What Social Darwinists chiefly argued about, without consciously putting it in those terms, which would have given the game away, was which form of competition was desirable and ensured progress or, if one adapted to it successfully, survival, and which types of competition should be suppressed; to have recognized them all as potentially operative, as a Darwinian would do in biology, would have removed the point" (p. 94). That is to say, even if you believed the government should stop your business from crushing other businesses-- survival of the fittest, after all-- you probably did believe that the government should prosecute people who tried to steal from your business-- even though surely that was survival of the fittest too!

Very few people disagreed on whether Darwin applied to social life, they just disagreed on what was "natural" and should be allowed, and what was supposedly stymieing evolution and thus should not be allowed. If you were a socialist, you thought capitalism an unnatural development holding back evolution. First decide who you want to be victors/survivors, then "endorse or condemn forms of competition depending on whether they seemed likely to ensure the desired result" (Burrow, p. 94). 

Most socialists who drew on Darwin seemed to skew toward the peaceful end; in his book Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) (1894), the Italian crimonologist Enrico Ferri argued that science showed violence was in fact not part of the revolution: "the processes of evolution and revolution—the only wholly social or collective processes—are the most efficacious, while partial rebellion and, still more, individual violence have only a very feeble power of social transformation" (p. 145). For Ferri, "revolution" meant "the concluding phase of an evolution" and was not to be used "in the current and incorrect sense of a stormy and violent revolt" (p. 141). Darwinism validate peaceful transition. But Ferri's book was translated into English by the "millionaire socialist" Robert Rives La Monte, who argued in his essay "Science and Revolution" (1909) that "a social cataclysm or revolution to be necessary to break the shell of capitalism within which the chick of the Society of Fellowship has been developing" (p. 105). He ended his essay by declaiming, "Let us be careful not to go to extremes and deny the fact and the fruitfulness of slow evolution, but let us with equal determination assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution! […] I find it difficult, I repeat, to see how any sane man […] can not believe a cataclysmic revolution not only inevitable, but a consummation devoutly to be desired" (p. 113). Even within the same ideology, you could apply Darwinism and get two completely contradictory results.

Paul admits it might all be rhetoric... but "rhetoric can be a potent resource" (p. 242). And it was a potent rhetoric too. If you were using Darwinism, Burrow argues that every struggle was magnified in importance: "Great-power status, imperialist expansion, the control of crime or disease, were spoken of [...] as matters of national life or death. Class and racial tensions too were projected onto the scale of world history, of continuing social evolution, as though the fate of nations or humanity, with alternatives of utopia or the extremity of grovelling degeneracy, of world domination or ultimate extinction or enslavement, hung poised in the balance" (pp. 95-6). Every little struggle became charged with cosmic significance.

Little wonder, then, that the writers of the early sf I look it drew on (social) Darwinism so much.