Degeneration (social theory)

“ As they grow up, they show this degeneration by engaging in all kinds of licentious debauchery, and unnatural and perverted indulgences of appetite. In nine cases out of ten, they will spend the fortunes inherited from their parents in riotous debauchery, and [222] will eventually sink, if death does not overtake them, to the level of their fellow degenerates—those who have been brought into existence by poverty and debauchery, and who await them at the foot of the social ladder. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the close of the year 1883 the degeneracy doctrine may be regarded as having practically been accepted in biology, in anthropology, in sociology, in criminology, in psychiatry, and general pathology. ”

“ I have shown elsewhere, that the congenital criminal is the result of degeneration, and that he comes from all classes of society. He is, however, most frequently the product of the lower classes, and lives [227] and dies among his congeners. I have shown, also, that the anarchist, the nihilist, and the socialist belong to the same category of degenerate beings. Poverty, brought on by high taxation, by war, and by overcrowding, has been, during the last millenary period, very fertile in the production of degenerates in the Old World. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ Another class, the lowest, is made up of individuals opposed to all sense of uprightness, who, being without education, perpetually dragged back by their material and moral destitution into the primitive forms of the brute struggle for existence, inherit from their parents and transmit to their children an abnormal organisation, adding degeneration and disease, an atavistic return to savage humanity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a mental trait, marking a person off as, in some sense, worse than others in the same social group, degeneracy appears to consist in some lack in the higher organization of thought. It is not that one has the normal mental outfit plus something additional, called wrong, crime, sin, madness, or the like, but that he is in some way deficient in the mental activity by which sympathy is created and by which all impulses are unified with reference to a general life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It only remained to define the meaning of “nation that has degenerated.” This was the rock on which they foundered; a degenerate people meant, they said, “A people which through bad government, misuse of wealth, fanaticism, or irreligion, had lost the characteristic virtues of its ancestors.” What a fall is there! Thus a people dies of its endemic diseases because it is degenerate, and is degenerate because it dies. This circular argument merely proves that the science of social anatomy is in its infancy. I quite agree that societies perish because they are degenerate, and for no other reason. ”

“ 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 closeness of the connection between degeneracy and crime is, to a considerable extent, determined by social conditions. A degenerate person, who has to earn his own livelihood, is much more likely to become a criminal than another degenerate person who has not. Almost all forms of degeneracy render a man more or less unsuited for the common work of life; it is not easy for such a man to obtain employment; in certain forms of degeneracy it becomes almost impossible. ”

“ While physical degeneracy creates crime, a non-moral life on the other hand causes further physical deterioration. The pursuit of wealth for purely personal ends is pre-eminently anti-social. Breadth of thought and social feeling grow impossible to the man whose life is devoted to the business of amassing riches ”

“ The disease inherent in her being, that deadly outcome of social tyranny which perverts the generous elements of youth into mere seeds of destruction, developed day by day, blighting her heart, corrupting her moral sense, even setting marks of evil upon the beauty of her countenance. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Reformation in the fullest sense of the word is almost out of the question in his case. The proper policy for society with reference to the instinctive criminal class, which constitutes but a small portion of our total criminal population, would be segregation for life. Practically, of course, this may have its difficulties until we perfect our means of discovering slight mental defects in individuals which make them incapable of social adjustment, but practically, also, we have found means of recognizing this type by such marks as incorrigibility, recidivism, and the stigmata of degeneracy. ”

“ If I manage to prove this proposition, I shall have given a meaning to the word "degeneration." By showing how the essential quality of a nation gradually alters, I shift the responsibility for its decadence, which thus becomes, in a way, less shameful, for it weighs no longer on the sons, but on the nephews, then on the cousins, then on collaterals more or less removed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The herding of the poor into crowded tenements, the inability to find work, the lack of wholesome interests and excitements to provide a normal outlet for energy of body and mind, the daily sight of the luxury of the rich and the bitterness of its contrast with their own need, awaken dangerous passions and reckless defiance of law. The lack of education, contact with absorption of law-defying philosophies of life, tend to make crime appear natural and justified. All of these unhealthy conditions are being attacked under the spur of our new social conscience ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is altogether a social matter at bottom; that is to say, degeneracy exists only in a certain relation between a person and the rest of a group. In so far as any mental or physical traits constitute it they do so because they involve unfitness for a normal social career, in which alone the essence of the matter is found. The only palpable test of it—and this an uncertain one—is found in the actual career of the person, and especially in the attitude toward him of the organized thought of the group. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Degeneracy betrays itself among men in certain physical [17] characteristics, which are denominated ‘stigmata,’ or brand-marks—an unfortunate term derived from a false idea, as if degeneracy were necessarily the consequence of a fault, and the indication of it a punishment. ”

“ Now let us turn our attention to the evidences of luxury and debauchery, and the consequent evidences of degeneration, which obtrude themselves on all sides. The reckless extravagance of the nobility of the Old World is well known. Vice and licentiousness even penetrate to royal households, and princes of the blood pose as roués and debauchees. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, degeneration in the wealthy classes of society generally makes itself evident by the appearance of psycho-sexual disorders. ”

“ In judging of the relation of the lower to the higher stages of civilization, it is essential to gain some idea how far it may have been affected by such degeneration. What kind of evidence can direct observation and history give as to the degradation of men from a civilized condition towards that of savagery? In our great cities, the so-called ‘dangerous classes’ are sunk in hideous misery and depravity. ”

“ I use the phrase personal degeneracy, then, to describe the state of persons whose character and conduct fall distinctly below the type or standard regarded as normal by the dominant sentiment of the group. Although it must be admitted that this definition is a vague one, it is not more so, perhaps, than most definitions of mental or social phenomena. There is no sharp criterion of what is mentally and socially up to par and what is not, but there are large and important classes whose inferiority is evident, such as idiots, imbeciles, the insane, drunkards 377and criminals ”