Ham-fisted Agitprop Posing as a Film

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 3:48 pm by Mark Shea

Ham-fisted Agitprop Posing as a Film 2014-12-31T15:48:31-07:00 Mark Shea

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Any film that puts “Good riddance to the vindictive bugger” on the lips of a Victorian speaking about God is agitprop, not film. The Victorian period produced atheists, to be sure. But the sort of athiests it produced were people who broke the Commandments but strictly observed the Conventions. They laid the intellectual foundations for 20th century genocide and slaughter, but they did it with impeccable Anglican courtesy and the air of scientific coolness:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [that is, the ones who look the most like savages in structure]… will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope… the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla. – Charles Darwin

And so, at the conclusion of his Descent of Man, he points the way for the European race to become the Master Race or simply (once inferior races have been exterminated) the human race:

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes such care. [Therefore] both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind. – Charles Darwin

Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton could not have agreed more. Concurring with so many leading thinkers that we are creatures who owe our being, not to God, but to a fortuitous collision of matter and energy, Galton built on Darwin’s work by founding a new science of human breeding which he called “eugenics”. Galton had no truck with the mysticism of the Judeo-Christian tradition (enshrined in documents like the Declaration of Independence) that “all men are created equal”:

I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality.

Galton fancied himself a hard-headed scientific thinker. So he naturally constructed what seemed to him a scientific hierarchy of “grades” by which he rated the various races of homo sapiens. It turned out that Galton rated “Negroes” very low, commenting that “mistakes the Negroes made in their matters were so childish, stupid and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species” Happily for Galton, he himself belonged to the superior race of Anglo-Saxons, with its wonderful genetic traits capable of “producing judges, statesmen, commanders, men of literature and science, poets, artists, and divines.” And, Galton believed, we must make it our goal to better the race still more by selective breeding and the weeding out of the “unfit”. Inferiors, he thought, should be treated “with all kindness” so long as they complied with the demand of their betters for celibacy. But if they dared to breed “such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.

How much you wanna bet none of *that* gets into this cinematic hagiography?

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