Intelligence-based eugenics in a future Britain
The Ministry of Brains, headquartered in London, regulates the intellectual development of every citizen in Britain. The government has determined that the best way to avoid another war is to elevate the intelligence of the populace. (That doesn’t seem logical to me, since I think greed and arrogance would be bigger factors to worry about than stupidity, but that’s Macaulay’s premise.) Each individual is given a grade for their mental acuity. A1 for the brainy, for example; C3 for the dense. In order to encourage the birth of more intelligent children, men and women are only allowed to marry partners who have a brain rating within a prescribed close proximity to their own. Some individuals with a history of mental deficiency in their families are forbidden from marrying at all. To discourage the disregarding of these laws, parents with stupid babies are taxed for their dumb offspring, while those with smart babies receive benefits. The Ministry of Brains also administers a system of Mind Training Courses, designed to raise the intelligence and mental efficiency of even the lowest rated brains. The government has made these courses mandatory, unless a citizen is able to obtain an exemption, usually given in cases of mental incompetence.
What Not isn’t so much about the science, philosophy, or morality of this eugenics program. This isn’t a science fiction novel like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s more about the public’s reaction to the program, as explored through debates between the characters. The story focuses primarily on four civil servants who work for the Ministry of Brains. They spend their weekends in a rural town outside of London called Little Chantreys, where we are introduced to a confusing array of what seems like dozens of minor characters. Most of the small-town residents are conservative in nature and object to the new-fangled ways of the government’s Brains program, while the employees of the Ministry are duty-bound to defend their department and its policies.
The purpose of all this is social satire, at least for the first half of the book. Every sentence of Macaulay’s prose is dripping with sardonic humor of a peculiarly British nature. She indiscriminately makes fun of the rich, the poor, the smart, the stupid, Christians, Atheists, government, clergy, and labor alike. Since so much of the satire is directed specifically towards British society, the jokes don’t always connect with the American reader. About the halfway point, the novel takes a more serious turn as it focuses more emphatically on a love story between a man and a woman forbidden by government policy to marry. This love story is a cut above the typical romance one finds in century-old English literature. In fact, the book’s romance is more successfully compelling than its humor is successfully funny.
In the end, Macaulay doesn’t really have anything profound to say about the subject of eugenics, but one can see how the intelligence policies of the Ministry of Brains could be a symbol of encroachments upon civil liberties in general. Macaulay would have certainly witnessed plenty of such encroachments during the Great War. Her viewpoint as expressed here leans to the side of liberalism. Macaulay never seems to take her subject too seriously, however, so why should the reader? It all just feels like an excuse to tell a love story, and not a bad one at that.
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