Modernism/modernity

My title, "Making Us New," alludes to the rallying cry of modernist art, "Make it New," put forward by Ezra Pound—a slogan that "summed up the aspirations of more than one generation of modernists."¹ This desire for the new, as Michael North points out, flowed in both revolutionary and reactionary directions, and applied to myriad aspects of art and culture.² At around the same time modernist artists sought to make art new, and as part of the same cultural infatuation with novelty, a wide array of thinkers from all points on the ideological spectrum and various disciplines in the social and biological sciences sought to make humans new, to improve "the race."³

In exploring the origin of Pound's phrase, North points out that the Chinese saying from which Pound adapted the motto more accurately suggests that one renovate oneself (North, Novelty, 163–64). The idea of renovation highlights the ambiguity inherent in the word "new": where is the line between renovating an existing entity and replacing it with something else? Such a question indicates the spectrum of thinking about newness occupied at each end by eugenics and transhumanism, two related but distinct ways of promoting human improvement in the early twentieth century.⁴ For the most part, eugenics aimed to make humans new in the sense of raising the average to the level of what its practitioners considered the most extraordinary, while transhumanism, even in its earliest forms, looked past existing "best" types in search of more radical change.

Both of these possibilities were contained in the term "superman," borrowed from Nietzsche and used very loosely in eugenic [End Page 177] and transhumanist discourse.⁵ For example, in The Conquest of Life (1928), French surgeon Serge Voronoff asked, "Why not try creating a race of super-men, endowed with physical and intellectual attributes very superior to ours?"⁶ The phrase "very superior" leaves open the question whether Voronoff was envisioning the combination of attributes seen in exceptional living individuals, or attributes superior to what had ever been seen. Similarly, Nietzsche scholar Maximilian Mügge wrote in the Eugenics Review that eugenics aims at a "race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind … as man is superior to the worm" (quoted in Stone, Breeding Superman 62).⁷ Given the difference between a human being and a worm, this degree of newness suggests changes greater than most readers of the Eugenics Review sought or imagined. On the other hand, American Nobel prize-winning geneticist Hermann Muller hoped "it would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx (I purposely mention men of different fields and races), or even to possess their varied faculties combined."⁸

The question was, then, whether the superman would be, say, as brilliant as Albert Einstein and as fast as Jesse Owens, or whether he (the superman was nearly always conceived as male) would be more brilliant and athletic than all existing human beings, superior to a degree that could hardly be imagined?⁹ Without using the term "trans-humanism," Peter Bowler articulates this difference when he describes the interest of early twentieth-century scientists J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane in profound change: "The enthusiasts no longer wanted to perfect the traditional human form—they sought to define what the future form of the race would be" (Bowler, History of the Future, 193). And Bernal adds his own description of the differing views when he wonders if humanity will end up splitting into two groups, "one section developing a fully-balanced humanity, the other groping unsteadily beyond it."¹⁰

In this essay I trace some of the underlying intellectual and political differences that distinguish the eugenic philosophy of Anthony Ludovici, as conveyed in his 1925 speculative essay Lysistrata; or, Woman's Future and Future Woman, from the early transhumanism of Bernal, as expressed in his 1929 scientific speculation, The World, the Flesh and the Devil.¹¹ Both eugenics and early transhumanism aimed to improve...