Degeneration (social science)

“ In the downward course of mental disease-processes the degeneration is from the complex to the simple, from the stable to the unstable, from the highly organized to the lowly organized. In the different forms of mental diseases first the moral life, then the social instincts become affected, the patient becomes selfish, introspective, morally selfish, then loses all regard for others, becomes careless, wasteful and negligent of his vocations, life-work, and duties ”

“ If this notion be accepted, then is the idea of degeneration as a normal phase of life rendered still more feasible and plain. Reaching to the individual and to the species as well; extending and including in its scope the lowly organized as well as the higher being; affecting one group or class lightly, and influencing another wellnigh to the complete exclusion of progress, we find degeneration and retrogression to be numbered among the stern realities of existence. ”

“ And, finally, if the congenital criminal is not himself the direct product of the environment, he is indirectly its product through the degeneration begun in his ancestors, by some acute disease in some cases, but by debilitating poverty in the majority of cases, and afterward hereditarily transmitted and aggravated in accordance with the inexorable laws discovered by modern science. ”

“ Degeneration is a necessary part of the process of organic evolution. All progress, whether anatomical, intellectual, or social, takes place through selection, and selection means the pining and ultimate passing away of that which is left. In individual evolution it is organs, ideas, and traits of character that are eliminated, and in social evolution it is customs and institutions. ”

“ Pathological selection of nervous parties, who seem to be attracted to one another by invincible sympathies, involves the same probabilities of degeneration as morbid consanguinity. It appears with nervous, hysterical, and veneric persons, and with criminals, among whom vice becomes the basis of unions leading to progressive degeneracy. ”

“ And with this physical degeneration we find mental and moral deterioration. The frequent expression of the poor, “We have no sickness, thank God,” is uttered by those whose sunken eyes, pale cheeks, and colorless lips speak more eloquently than words, of the unseen agencies which are sapping the fountains of health. Vice, crime, drunkenness, lust, disease, and death, here hold sway, in spite of the most powerful moral and religious influences. ”

“ Besides resulting in ultimate sterility, morbid heredity and degeneration contribute to the destruction of families and races by producing mental and moral differences among them that lead to dissensions and conflicts as mischievous as diseases. ”

“ A great many young persons who enter the city with high hopes of making a fortune fail to get a foothold or gradually lose their grip and are swept along in the current of the city's débris. Illness, accident, and repeated failure are all causes of degeneration.
Along with misfortune belongs misconduct. Those causes which produce poverty like intemperance, idleness, and ignorance, are productive of degeneracy, also. They render the individual unfit to meet the responsibilities of life, and tend not only to incompetence but also to sensuality and even crime. ”

“ Some of the most important and serious problems which confront humanity to-day lie in the realm of mental and neural maladjustments. For human progress and social welfare are in last analysis based fundamentally on the results of normal reactions of human nervous systems. Any serious derangement of the latter may, and in certain cases must, lead to more or less disaster for the individual and disorder for society of which he is a unit. ”

“ Influence of Physical Degeneracy upon Crime. By degeneracy we mean, to use Morel's definition, "a morbid deviation from the normal type." That is, degeneracy is such an alteration of organic structures and functions that the organism becomes incapable of adapting itself to more or less complex conditions. Ordinary forms of degeneracy that are well recognized are feeble-mindedness, chronic insanity, chronic epilepsy, congenital deaf-mutism, habitual pauperism, and the like. Now there can be no doubt that criminality in some of its forms is related to these functional forms of degeneracy. ”

“ Drunken, depraved, or feeble-minded parents usually produce children with the same inheritances or tendencies; family quarrelling and an utter absence of moral training do not foster the development of character. A slum environment in the city strengthens the evil tendencies of such a home, as it counterbalances the good effects of a wholesome home environment. Mental and moral degeneracy is always present in society, and if unchecked spreads widely; physical degeneracy is so common as to be alarming, resulting in dangerous forms of disease, imbecility, and insanity. ”

“ When you segregate your young men by thousands in the heart of this "city of dreadful night," amid conditions of life which are most antagonistic to moral and physical well-being... the result is a foregone conclusion, and it does not only mean physical degeneration, it also means moral degeneration, and it becomes a most potent predisposing factor in political disease. ”

“ In cases where the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, “I have witnessed the results,” he says, “in a degeneracy mental and physical of his offspring which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. I cannot but think after what I have seen that the extreme passion for getting rich does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring, either to moral defect or to moral and intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 206.) ”

“ It is claimed that the practical application has become a necessity because among all civilized nations there is a marked tendency to general degeneration. I do not believe that this assertion has been adequately proved. In modern society the conditions of life have become markedly varied as compared with those of former periods. ”

“ And this makes it very evident that the science which is principally, if not exclusively, engaged in studying these phenomena of social disease, should feel the necessity of finding a more exact diagnosis of these moral diseases of society, in order to arrive at some effective and more humane remedy, which should more victoriously combat this somber trinity of insanity, suicide and crime. ”

“ And the abnormal man who is below the minimum of adaptability to social life and bears the marks of organic degeneration, develops either a passive or an aggressive form of abnormality and becomes a criminal. ”

“ PERSONAL DEGENERACY Is a Phase of the Question of Right and Wrong—Relation to the Idea of Development—Justification and Meaning of the Phrase “Personal Degeneracy”—Hereditary and Social Factors in Personal Degeneracy—Degeneracy as a Mental Trait—Conscience in Degeneracy—Crime, Insanity, and Responsibility—General Aims in the Treatment of Degeneracy. ”

“ If the morbid manifestations can be traced back for several generations, if the bodily defects and disturbances of development (the so-called stigmata of degeneration) , are well marked and numerous, if the functional disorders of the nervous system and of the sense organs are pronounced, leading to idiocy, insanity, epilepsy, congenital deafmutism, blindness, instinctive criminality,—there is in such cases little or no hope of the regeneration of the family. It dies out, because the members are sterile; because they are confined in prisons or asylums ”

“ Later, when we come to deal with environment, I shall show that there are many other causes of degeneration and of crime. But here I only point out that atavism and degeneration account for from thirty to forty per cent, of the criminals of the present day. That atavism and degeneration are forced upon the unborn child by heredity; that therefore these forty per cent, of our criminals are unfortunate victims of fate, and are no more blameworthy nor wicked than the victims of a railway accident, or an earthquake, or an epidemic of cholera or smallpox. ”

“ Degeneration manifests itself in the protean forms of suicide, insanity, crime and vice, which abound in the highest civilization, where the tension of life is extreme, and in those places from [Pg 13] which civilization has ebbed and from which population has been drained, leaving a discouraged remnant to struggle against deteriorating conditions.... Like insanity, crime occurs most frequently in densely populated towns on the one hand, and on the other in partially deserted rural districts. ”

“ Investigations of thousands of feeble-minded families show that, in such a case, every one of the offspring may be and probably will be feeble-minded—a curse to himself and a burden to society. Pauperism, crime, social dependence, vice, all follow in the train of mental defect, and the mentally defective parents hand on for untold generations their taint—sometimes in more, sometimes in less virulent form, but always bringing into the world beings not only incapable of caring for themselves, but fatally capable of handing [Pg 40] on their defect to the future. ”

“ Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing upon it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization. ”

“ At first, unlike its ordinary course, the disease seemed to confine itself to the higher circles of society, selecting its victims from among the proud, the well-born and the wealthy, entering unabashed into stately chambers, and lying down with the slumberers in silken beds. ”

“ Living under similar customs, habits and surroundings, labouring at the same occupation, indulging in the same dissipation, tend to engender like diseases and degenerations, irrespective of any blood relationship. ”

“ Also, whereas, to a certain extent, we know whence bodily disorders arise, moral disorders come of faulty education, the thousand and one follies with which the human brain is afflicted, in short, any irregular condition of the social body. ”

“ There is one disease that without other causes—either inherited degeneracy or vices resulting from a bad education and environment—is capable of transforming a healthy individual into a vicious, hopelessly evil being. ”

“ Poverty causes ill health, and malnutrition saps the power of self-control.
Medical science is even now telling us that there is probably no form of criminal tendency unrelated to physiological defects: brain-cells poisoned by disease; brain-cells defective either through heredity—as in the offspring of the feeble-minded—or enfeebled through malnutrition in childhood, the offspring of want; brains slightly out of balance; and, more rarely, the criminal impulse developed as the result of direct injury to the brain caused by a blow. ”

“ And if physical deformity was thus enough to preserve his body until its allotted end, how much more would not moral and mental deformity avail!
A moral and mental deviation would be still more likely to condemn a man to that neglect from his fellows which is so conducive to our real welfare. ”

“ Later, the anti-social man was regarded as a pathological product—the victim of disease; and it is one of the fashions of to-day to regard him as 'a social product'—the victim of adverse social environment. ”

“ This mental and moral heredity, over-leaping all boundaries of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good influence or an immoral contagion through the community. And thus, in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the community. ”

“ The eradication of every kind of degeneracy is hence the solemn duty of society to relieve the burden of the community, and by the reduction of the lower types in each successive generation, degeneracy could be weeded out of human society. ”

“ The problem of abnormality—crime, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, etc. How far is abnormality the unavoidable manifestation of inborn tendencies of the individual, and how far is it a matter of deficient social organization,—the failure of institutional influences? There is a quantitative difference of efficiency between individuals, but if there is hardly a human attitude which if properly controlled and directed could not be used in a socially useful and productive way, must there remain a permanent qualitative difference between socially normal and anti-social actions? ”

“ Even now our gaols are filled with society-made criminals, that education and better circumstances might have rescued from a life of misery and crime. Even now youth is stunted and starved, and men and women pine away, racked with some terrible disease which thoughtless and careless parents have transmitted to them. ”

“ It may be set down, then, as a fact of observation that mental degeneracy in one generation is sometimes the evident cause of an innate deficiency or absence of moral sense in the next generation. The child bears the burden of its ancestral infirmities or wrong-doings. Here, then, and in this relation, may be noted the instructive fact that just as moral feeling was the first function to be affected at the beginning of mental derangement in the individual, so now the defect or absence of it is seen to mark the way of degeneracy through generations. ”

“ Luxury, idleness, excesses, syphilis, debility, drunkenness, poverty, disease, and overwork produce vitiated constitutions in which varying types of insanity appear in various nations and climates, but, so far as is known at present, not in very different degree under similar conditions. One of the great problems of the day is whether the many conditions incompatible with health in our crowded populations can be overcome so as to prevent the degeneration going on thereby. ”