God's Blueprints by John McKelvie Whitworth

Author:John McKelvie Whitworth [Whitworth, John McKelvie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780429678288
Google: TtSNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-19T04:52:46+00:00

The stirpicultural experiment

In 1846, Noyes had sarcastically dismissed as ‘chimerical schemes’ the arguments of advocates of race improvement by means of ‘scientific marriages’, and he commented only very briefly on the possibility that male continence might facilitate the deliberate improvement of the human race. Throughout his five-year sojourn at Brooklyn, Noyes appears to have believed that widespread publication of his ideas, coupled with the existence of the Oneida Community as a prototype of the regenerate life, would be sufficient, in conjunction with the power of the Holy Spirit, to effect a rapid transformation of American society and eventually of the world. Noyes’s changing conception of his mission will be discussed in more detail below; at this point it is sufficient to indicate that he slowly developed a more gradualistic, or to use his own term, ‘geological’, conception of God’s plan for mankind. Concomitantly, after a period of concentration on the regulation of the internal affairs of the sect, Noyes’s attitude to the external society changed and he, and at least some of his followers, came to regard themselves as the vanguard of moral and social reform.

Noyes’s interest in the possibility of breeding a physically and morally superior group appears to have developed at the time of the American Civil War. In 1865, a leading article in The Circular by its co-editor, George Noyes, dwelt on the possibility that ‘scientific’ control of reproduction within the Community might result in the production of ‘geniuses’. George Noyes, who was completely subordinate to his elder brother, cited divine precedent for the project, and claimed that God had exercised ‘the herdsman’s right’ of selection among the progeny of Noah.

From these initial speculations the theoretical basis and justification of ‘stirpiculture’ was developed in the immediate post-Civil War years. (The term was coined by Noyes to signify selective breeding from a common stock or ‘family’.) In this period the sectarians were brought to an appreciation of the sublimity and divine origins of the experiment, which was inaugurated in 1868. Noyes’s ideas on this topic were made widely public in the mid eighteen seventies in a pamphlet, Essay on Scientific Propagation, in which Noyes provided evidence of his interest in the social sciences, and stated, in markedly Comtean or Spencerian terms that ‘it is generally agreed among the highest thinkers that sociology is the science around which all other sciences are finally to be organized’ (Noyes, 1875?, p. 3). He added that, as the nucleus of human learning, sociology was inevitably complex, but that its ‘nucleolus’ was, or would be, the science which presided over reproduction.

Having established the supreme importance of the experiment which was already inaugurated at Oneida, Noyes sought to substantiate his theoretical statements by adducing aspects of the work of Darwin and Galton as additional support for his essentially Lamarckian conception that the acquired characteristics of parents might be transmitted to their offspring. Noyes referred approvingly to Galton’s conclusions regarding the hereditary nature of genius, but castigated him for a reluctance to move from scholarship to practical measures and policies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.