Part One: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

(upbeat music) - Cool, so, media. - Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where I started the introduction before recording, but then I started recording because I remembered and Dave gave me some shit on it. And our guest for this week, the great David Christopher Bell. How are you doing, Dave? - I'm doing great. I'm living the dream. - Living the dream. What is the dream? - Living the dream. - Having shirts with the faces of our pets on it. - Oh, that is the dream, actually, yeah. - Is that kitten? Oh, kitten in the new one. - Yeah. - Yeah, Rue. - And Anakin, I got this signature shirt from my friend Beth Ann. - Oh wow. - It's beautiful. - I don't have my cat on a shirt, but I do have some old Go Forthemed Simpson shirts that have Saddam Hussein on them. And my cat's name is Saddam Hussein. - That's close enough. - Accounts, the counts. - Yeah, counts. - We also have those shirts with each other's faces on them that we ordered. - We do, so we do. - One live show. - We should never talk about that in reference to pets and stuff though. That would be weird. - We're at every episode, right? - We're at every episode. - Yeah, that's right. - That's right. - I just wear it to the grocery store, you know? - Yeah. - Oh, good. - After the fight club, when I go to my local fight club, I always wear it, yeah. - Oh, I'm glad it's getting good use. I'm glad it's not just the grocery store. - I do have a concern because you and I are both men of more or less a certain age, right? So we grew up the right way, obviously. - We're partling towards the grave. - We are partling towards the grave. But we were, you watched Mulan as a kid, right? - Not as much as a lot of people my age. - I watched it a lot. - I watched it and I think the lesson, whether you saw it once or a dozen times, that Mulan did a really good job of imparting is that you always need to be ready for the hunts to attack, right? And there's some good lessons in there about how to kill a large number of hunts with the minimal amount of ammunition use, right? And my concern, 'cause I was watching this with a kid's friend recently, and I realized, 'cause I've watched a lot of media with this kid, kids today aren't learning about how to defeat the hunts. No one's telling them about the danger of the hunts. What's gonna happen? - Well, it's up to us. - I know, it's up to us and we're not doing the job right now. We were warned about the hunts, but they're not being warned. It worries me, Dave. - Yeah, we have to go school to school, like a program. You know, when you're having an assembly and like someone would come in with puppets. - Yeah, I can tell you about that. - Just hunts, here's a till, huh? - Yeah, hunts from the movie, not really accurate. - Such a good movie, though, guys. - Such a good movie, a bob. - Oh yeah. It is 'cause I think, based on historically, wouldn't would have been set. This was roughly contemporaneous to like the height of the Roman Empire when Moulinah set, and the hunts really wouldn't have been certainly not in China, like I don't know where. - No, no, no. I think they didn't want it to be Mongolian. - Never count on Disney being historically accurate, and not-- - Yeah, they picked a different kind of races to be. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like always, always at minimum, a little race is all the way up to a lot of races. - Yeah, it's gotta be some kind. - And historically inaccurate, but-- - 95% of the time. - As an Italian, I'm okay with bigotry against the hunts, because as far as I'm aware from history, we were doing great until the hunts came. No problems in the Roman Empire until the Tilla showed up. How was what things went wrong? - This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed human. - On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering the ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pignero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survived what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask, why am I like this? I'm James Beck, host of the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from sending boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a four-year page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of racism, Dave. Are you ever wondered who invented racism? Oh God, was it like James T. Racism? Jonathan H. Racism, yes, yes, of the. Of the Portland Racist Empire, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, human beings have never needed like a scientific justification to be shitty to people who live far away and practice strange customs. Like if you're like the word barbarian, literally exists because the ancient Greeks heard some people who lived like today, we'd say like 40 minutes away from Greece. And they're like, there's people, it just sounds like they're going barbar, barbar, barbar, all the time. That's why it's literally where the term came from. Yeah. I imagine like the first cavemen, right? Where it's like a caveman fan. It's the other guy from this other cave. They're moving it to them and they're like, I don't know why, I don't know. I don't like their customs. Yeah, I think we should kill 'em all. It is funny how long some of these, like if you heard of the Burbers in like a lot of North Africa, like Morocco, right? 'Cause they're kind of the indigenous people of Morocco. Like their name comes from barbar, from the barbarian term, right? Like it's still, and that's not what the Burbers prefer to be called. 'Cause that's actually kind of a racial slayer for them. They prefer to be called, I think it's the Maseek. And so I bring this up to say that no one like had to invent prejudice and human beings had been doing slavery and colonialism for a long time prior to the enlightenment. But it's the enlightenment that gives us racism, right? In its modern term, since, you know? Like that's the racism where you're not just, 'cause it used to be back in the day. All you needed to say is like, well, we're from Rome and those guys aren't. So like fuck 'em, yeah. Like people didn't-- Yeah, you're saying that like when we really leveled up our racism, because the upside of the ancient Roman era prejudice is that like if you're saying, okay, they're not Roman, fuck 'em. When you conquer them, they kind of become Roman. And then you stop being addicted to 'em for the most part, right? That's not, I'm smooth and over for some stuff, but it was a lot less shitty than it was like with racism today, where we're still dealing with the after effects of like slavery, right? And the bigotry, and that's because of scientific racism. And scientific racism is a product of the enlightenment and that kind of like early modern period where people are starting to put together science and they're doing it kind of the wrong way. And the guy who's most responsible for creating modern racism, I sort of marrying these early ideas of science to the prejudice that had always existed is a man named Francis Galton. Francis Galton is the subject of our episodes this week and one of the most influential people in all of human history. I cannot overstate this. In terms of the impact Galton has had, he's absolutely on the level of a guy like Hitler. But unlike Hitler, he didn't like kill anybody. He was a scientist. He wrote books, you know? And he also-- - Right. He didn't, there was no point in his life, probably, when he was like, man, I'm a real Hitler right now. - Yeah, I really got to do some Hitler stuff. So, he died probably thinking he let a good life, I guess. - He absolutely did, but Hitler also was like Francis Galton, that guy had some shit locked out. Like we're definitely gonna copy some Francis Galton stuff. And the weird thing about Galton, because he was a really brilliant scientist in a lot of ways, he also did a lot of good stuff. Like he is the person who gets credit for being the first mathematician, I guess, to observe and demonstrate the concept of regression to the mean, and he gets credit for discovering correlation as a statistical concept. So like, most of a lot of, I mean, I don't, maybe most is too much, but a lot of modern statistics is based on shit Galton was the first guy to figure out, right? And there's a, he did a lot more stuff, right? And that's part of why he was such an influential racist, because the guy who invented you, he's the guy who invented eugenics. Like literally came up with the name eugenics. That's where-- - I think that's where we're-- - I fear we're getting around the eugenics of it all. - Yeah, we're talking about that idea of like racist trying to kind of counter racism and like science. - Yeah, and that idea that it's gotten so found, you know, it's stuff like, what, BMI being a thing that's like a guy measured like a bunch of soldiers in Ireland or something was like, everybody needs to be like this. - This is the ideal body shape. - Right, it's the weird idea that-- - A starving Irishman. - Yeah, I'm not saying throw out all science, obviously. But it's weird that we have such dogma from times like this, where it's filled with racist and weird tactics and yeah. - So let's talk about Francis and how he became the guy who invented racism, I guess. Not the king, that's still probably Hitler. So, Francis Galton was born on February 16th, 1822 at the Larches near Sparkbrook, Birmingham. That's obviously in England, right? Like, I don't, I don't need to specify that. The Larches. - Well, there's a Sparkbrook. - Obviously Birmingham. - It could be Alabama too, I guess. - Oh yeah. - So, Galton's family had lived in that area around Birmingham for ages. And they had made their, obviously, the founder of modern racism. His family were like arms merchants. Of course they were war profiteers. Like that's the most obvious way for them to have gotten rich. His grandfather Samuel took up work at his father's, so Galton's great grandfather had had a gun factory and Birmingham. And I think previously it had just been making muskets for like people to hunt or whatever with, right? Like it was not a military arms manufacturer. And then the Napoleonic wars start going. And he's like, oh, you know how what's a great way to make shit load of money right now? Is selling guns to the British army at the start of the Napoleonic wars. I think we're gonna need a lot of guns for about 20 fucking years. Is this Napoleon guy's gonna be a problem? So this makes them quite rich, right? The family gets loaded off of selling guns to the British army. But it also causes strife with their extended family because the Galton's were Quakers. And they had been Quakers longer than anyone could remember. And the Quakers, I think, are okay with hunting, but you know what the Quakers aren't okay with? Selling guns to an army. That's not really, no, yeah. But once Sammy will spun up production to start selling to the military, the Quakers are like, well, you can't keep being a Quaker 'cause that's like one of our main things is that you're not a war profiteer. So he gets formal, and his branch of the family is formally disowned from the Quakers in 1795 for fabricating and selling instruments of war. Although he keeps attending Quaker's services, I think they're too polite to kick him out. But he's no longer like, they're like, well, but you're not one of us. Right? Kick him out of the house of God. But it's really weird now. Yeah, you made it weird, Samuel. In his own autobiography, Frances Galton notes that his grandfather was also a scientific man and quote a statistical man of business. He was a fellow of the provincially famous lunar society whose members met at one another's houses on the day and the night of the full moon and which the small and numbers was so select as to include, and then he lists a number of famous scientists of the day, including a guy named Dr. Erasmus Darwin who's the father of the famous Darwin and the famous Darwin is like the half cousin of Frances Galton. They know each other most of their lives, right? And they're very close like friends. And we, I'm sorry, I'm petitioned to bring back the blank society as the blank or the same as something that isn't always filled. Whenever I hear the blank society, I think that's a bunch of races. But you're racist, yeah, but you gotta, yeah, you gotta bring it or it's something that Sherlock Holmes will bust up or something. Right, right. Yeah, they're doing some sort of scheme. Right, but they were right about the naming idea there. Like we should have the lunar society. I would love to be a part of a lunar society that sounds cool. Yeah, exactly. So it's clear to me that Frances Galton came to regard his war profiteer grandfather as the ancestor he took most after. That's why he emphasizes how statistical and scientific he is in the era in which that's not really as much of a thing. Like if you're, if in 1800, you're a man who believes in statistics, a lot of people will be like, well, that's nonsense. Math doesn't know things you fool. Right. Like it's not, there's controversy. I'm a basic elements of science in this period of time. Samuel Mary's into the famous Barclay family. You've heard of like Barclay Bank, right? Samuel Mary's into the Barclays and he starts a bank after the war, right? That's how he gets rich after he stops being a war profiteer. And he was described, one thing that's interesting, at the time he is described as a captain of industry. And like one of his biographies that someone writes in like 18 fucking 12 or something, he's called that. And that's not a term a lot of people are using in the early 1800s, right? That's more of like a later 1800s term. So he's among the very first people to be described as like a captain of industry. He's an early, he's really an early founder of capitalism in a lot of ways. Capitalism is still getting formed as an ideology. And this guy who's a war profiteer and a banker, but also a man of statistics and science is a very early, he's a lot of people see him as an early embodiment of like what a capitalist is supposed to be in the very first, almost the first generation in which they exist, not quite. Samuel's oldest son, Samuel Tertius Galton, partnered with him and that's Francis's father, partnered with him to run the bank and married a woman named Violetta Darwin, the daughter of his friend Erasmus, right? So that's how the Darwin's become a member or become entwined with the Galton family. Is Francis's dad marries the daughter of Erasmus? So Francis is born into a family of four sisters and two brothers and was the youngest member of the family to survive to adulthood. Life was dangerous even then for the very wealthy, his cousin Charles Darwin, not the more famous Charles R. Darwin. This is the Charles Darwin nobody hears about because he dies at age 20 as a medical student from what is described as a dissection wound. That means he's dissecting a cadaver or performing surgery and he cuts himself and then he dies of infection. That happened to a lot of surgeons and doctors in this period of time. - Yeah, this is the air where gravestones could just say stubbed toe. - Stubbed toe, got a little cut, if things went wrong. - Yeah, and especially the case, if you're like cutting up a corpse and you get corpse juice in your open wound, bad to get corpse juice in an open wound, generally want to avoid that. - Don't like that phrase, corpse juice, not into it, thank you so much. - Avoid it, avoid it as much as possible. - Yeah. - So because he had a, the Galton's were a large family and Francis's parents were rich. Most of the raising when he's a little boy is done by not his parents, but by his third sister Adele. She's 12 years older than him and severely disabled with a spinal curvature that left her bed ridden much of the time and unable to socialize or go out in public much at all. So instead, she focused all of her attention on her younger brother as he would later recall. She hailed my arrival into the world as a fairy gift and begged hard to be allowed to consider me as her sole ward and in her simple way educated herself as best as she could in order to be able to teach me. Her idea of education at that time was to teach the Bible as a verbally inspired book to cultivate memory to make me learn the nearest rudiments of Latin and above all a great deal of English verse. This she did effectively and the result was that she believed and succeeded in making others believe that I was a sort of infant prodigy. So what Galton is saying there is that she teaches him to memorize the Bible as a little kid and that convinces the people around them that he's a genius, right? He's always of the belief that I was not really a childhood genius, my sister convinced other people of that by helping me to like learn how to memorize the Bible because that's what she thought was what made an educated man and other people believed this as well. A visitor in their home to their home in 1828 when Francis was six described him as a prodigy recording that he read Shakespeare for fun and quote by reading a page over twice, he repeats it by heart. So he's got this very like, "identic memory," you know, where he could just look at something. Yeah. Yeah, nothing against anybody with a good memory but this is real like dumb guy, smart guy. Yeah, I think that memorize the shit, huh? Right, I had a social studies teacher that made us all memorize the preamble to the Constitution. Oh, I still have the memory. And I can still, yeah, I can still recite it. I don't know what any of it means really. Like, he never taught us like why it was important or maybe it did and I don't remember it anymore. It just lost to me. Yeah, this is a preamble. It's a very old timey 1800s way of like, this boy has memorized all the works of Shakespeare and it's like, well, that is impressive but does that mean he's like, smart? It doesn't mean he has a lot of Shakespeare memories. I would classify it underneath. That's neat. It's neat. Yeah, it's potentially impressive. Yeah, yeah. And this is, he would also, he develops an early habit of performances in which he'd recite some work of literature or poetry to his family. I've run into this in five or six biographies from this time, at least it seems to have been a common method of entertainment for families with bright children, usually wealthy families where they're like, oh yeah. I have the smart kid recite things for us, you know. Yeah, fucking sucked back then. I was watching him so bad. I think brotherhood of the wolf I was watching and there's seen in that where the guy is like, they're having dinner and he's like, I would like to recite a poem for everybody. It's like, oh my God, get a TV now. Yeah, fucking invented Netflix and dipshits. Yeah, they figured out a Hulu assholes. My God. They didn't even do it at a torrent. Yeah, bullshit. So Francis recalled performing Milton's paradise loss and Pope's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey for his family in his autobiography, perhaps sensing that bragging about his tendency for spouting versus a child made him seem arrogant. Francis included this passage. In middle life, I feared I had been an intolerable prig and cross-questioned many old family friends about it, but was invariably assured that I was not at all a prig but seemed to spout for pure enjoyment and without any affectation that I often quoted very aptly [BLANK_AUDIO] of the moment and that I was a nice little child it says a lot that he's like as an adult I worried I was an asshole as a kid but I was a sure no I wasn't no I wasn't I was very smart and good it's literally that skitter me and I had a touch no it's the children you know I'm a insufferable prig no yeah it's my memory that's wrong yeah um for my part I kind of suspect he was an intolerable prig as a kid but maybe that's unfair it is true that he grew into one as an adult one thing I find interesting about his prig status is that is that after he invented eugenics he came to believe the disabled people should be prevented from breeding even so he wrote this of his big sister and this is after his his official take is that we need to sterilize people who are born with any sort of genetic disability within you sort of like inherited disability right he writes this of his big sister though she was compelled to pass the greater part of her life lying on her back she was so energetic in other ways and so capable of endurance that she overcame difficulties that would have been insurmountable to most women who were equally handicapped she was active in setting up schools and teaching the poor she had a considerable correspondence and exerted a wide influence among all classes during many years her natural capacity was it of an unusually high order and many who knew her well and whose opinions deserve respect but that a slight betterment of opportunity and circumstances might have caused her name to be as widely loved and known as those of any of our English saints or heroines so he's saying is she was really smart she wasn't educated because she was a disabled girl in 1800 he's like this person really contributed to society yeah yeah yeah they were disabled they obviously can't contribute to society yeah obviously should be should be stopped from breeding I really owe everything to her my entire career as a scientist in a researcher to her educating me as a child but clearly disabled people have nothing nothing of value to to contribute to society like he the way he squares that has been being like well she was my sister so she must have been like a special kind of disabled right she has my special blood yeah exactly so from an early age Francis steered his Francis's parents steered him toward the sciences unfortunately this is the early 1800s well mid 1800s by the time he's like a teenager which means he's spent a good deal of time being exposed to absolute cranks and I fear they rubbed off on him here's one recollection and this is from when he would have been like five or six years old father discovered a needy foreign chemist who agreed to take me in hand at a rather high charge all I clearly recollect of him now was that he seemed obsessed with the idea of making some wonderful compound out of susinic acid which is derived from amber and that he spent all his spare shillings and buying bits of amber and burning them I learned nothing from his tuition so he's just like this mad man he thinks he's gonna make some compound out of amber that's got probably an alchemy sort of deal where it's gonna be an immortality elixir and make gold or some shit this is what I envy about people back then the right is you can look at the moon and say it's made of ghosts yeah and like they'll get enough people to go like yeah that's probably right that seems right well it's a writer too just the the if you're just the first guy to figure out I don't know what if a dude was dead but not and then you invent fucking Dracula right yeah it was a lot easier back then to be like a groundbreaking writer I mean all the way into the freaking seventies that would like you like listen I love Spielberg but it doesn't take a genius to go like what if a shark attack yeah what if a shark was scary yeah so by age five or so Francis is already out of the house attending boarding schools which started from him when he was like five and over the next several years he bounced around several including a boarding school in France which he hated because of the strict and abusive discipline kids were punished there by receiving a little metal mark they had to carry around with them whenever they spoke English and they could transfer these marks to other kids who screwed up right sorry side of boarding school in France it's a French boarding school in in England right and when when you speak English because you're supposed to be learning French they give you this little metal token that's like a token of shame and you lose privileges when you have it but you can get rid of this mark of shame by transferring it to another kid who screws up so it becomes common for children who have a mark and when they get rid of it to trick gullible kids into speaking English and Francis is the most gullible kid in the school so he gets he gets tricked a lot amazing it sounds like they're like actually created this weird economy in the school where shame economy yeah yeah yeah where and it's teaching the kids to like abuse the their fellow kids and and trick them in order to like transfer the punishments onto them Francis never gets over this he's pissed about this for the rest of his life and he lives a long-ass life he writes decades later in like 1900 something as an elderly man I rebelled with my whole heart against the treachery encouraged by this system and I get it that probably I was about to say yes this would be something I would take to my grave yeah I would probably take this to my grave yes I would be finding the people yeah those are who I'd be sterilizing as an adult where I a sterilizer you know um he had similar complaints when he was sent to kings Edward school and Birmingham as a teenager this is kind of his high school quote I learned nothing nothing and shaped it my limitations he hates school anytime he's like has to learn around other kids and part because he says that he craved topics that were denied to him at this fit because this rich kid school just focuses on the classics right it's the kind of school a lot of conservatives want all of education to be where you just learn like the Iliad and shit right and goons like no I wanted to learn I first off they would they wouldn't let me do any good English reading you're doing everything and fucking Latin and I didn't want to read in Latin I wanted to read in English and also I wanted to learn math and science and they didn't care about math and science because it had barely existed at that point in time and I didn't want to fucking memorize the god damn and need and Latin which bro I had to translate the Indian from Latin and it sucked ass so I get it Francis like I hear you man he provided an anecdote from his time in grade school that I do feel honor bound to share with you one of our school fellows a gaunt despeptic looking boy performed the following feet to our terror and admiration as we crowded around him to see it he took a frog by its hind feet opened his wide mouth and dropped the frog's four feet on his tongue the frog struggled to get free and at the critical moment his hind legs were let go down went the frog head foremost into his goet he was our hero for the time none other dared to attempt the same feet he said that he felt the frog all the way is it went down into his stomach and in it that's nuts oh yeah nothing to do I mean I love how that is a story yeah that could be from any era yeah dude like you could tell me that's for life crazy yeah George Bush and college same I believe it right if some kid had done that when I was in middle school I would remember that the rest of my life oh yeah yeah he'd be a king he'd be a king yeah I'm not like a king your respect or follow but a king like a king nonetheless the fact that he's like yeah he was the hero for the day I'm like yeah no you would be like he absolutely would be Francis's mother seems to have decided at some point during his adolescence that her genius son was destined for a career in medicine and his father seems to have done the same one presumes that his mom was influenced by the fact that her dad was doctor Erasmus Darwin a prominent physician and scientist now doctor Erasmus Darwin was an early and major proponent of the idea of biological evolution that all life descended from a single microscopic ancestor that had existed as a theory before Charles Darryl he's not the fact that Darwin writes out the origin of species doesn't mean no one was thinking about ideas that are related evolution and like we shouldn't take from this that doctor Erasmus Darwin had the whole idea of like natural selection down because he certainly didn't but he is one of a number of scientists that's like well there's probably a common origin to all life rather than God have just making a bunch of different animals and people and stuff and this is very controversial at the time Erasmus is attacked as a radical godless atheist as much as he's praised for being an icon of the enlightenment and you know who else is a godless atheist who seeks to destroy all of religion and faith you know he by force if necessary oh the sponsors of this podcast no that's yeah that's right we don't support that they're radical you know but but they are advertising on our podcast so please buy their by their product and support their destruction of all faith when I was 14 years old I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them I'm Elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files you just remember this low-taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up don't say anything every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming they are abducted stocked controlled and nearly silenced but these aren't stories about what's taken from them their stories about what it takes to make it out alive listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts on the new podcast solita we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Bignero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, "You smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here." It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-Cast of Temba is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on, do not disturb, but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast, and each week, we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s, from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. Unlike the quarter-life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and worth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your four-year page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. (upbeat music) This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story. I'm obsessed, so obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. So like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. And we're back. Wow, that was, I mean, again, I don't stand by what our advertiser said. - Wow, that was dark. - That was dark, extreme. Yeah, honestly, upsetting. But what can you do with advertisements, you know? You just take their money, and let's say whatever. Yeah, exactly, cash the check. That's right, that's right. So at age 16, Francis was pulled out of King Edward's school. His high school, his formal education, in 2016, because his dad's like, it's time for you to learn to be a doctor. And the way learning to be a doctor went, you don't like, they had medical schools, but it was not the same as medical school is now, you pretty much get tossed directly into an internship by working as a doctor's assistant under another doctor. So he gets pulled out of school at 16, and immediately starts interning at Birmingham General Hospital. There were so many fewer rules. - At that point in time. - That's horrifying. Imagine going to the hospital. Oh my god, I'm 16. - There's a fucking 16-year-old. And you've got like a fucking knife in your belly or something. - Oh, man, that would suck. - Oh man. After he'd left high school, but before he started work at the hospital, his dad decided reasonably enough that Francis should get an example of what to expect at the hospital first. That he's gonna pay him to follow a different doctor around first so that he can at least get prepared for being in an ER. And here's the description of that. This is his first experience with medicine. My father asked our medical attendant, Mr. P, to show me an example of the medical work I should be engaged in before I was plunged wholly into it. A servant brought a note for Mr. P awaiting an answer. It was to the effect that a housemate had suddenly died at Lord Blank's house and that he, Mr. P, was about to make a post-mortem examination. Would I like to come? Oh, the mixture of revulsion, wonder and interest and excitement. I changed clothes and went entering the house by a back door is directed and treading softly up the back staircase to the cold garret where the poor girl lay. She was the first dead person I had seen. Handsome and feature, but greatly swollen. She had been apparently in perfect health a few hours before. Then she was suddenly seized with intense pain in the stomach, followed rapidly by perientitis. And that's inflammation, often infection of the outer lining of the inner abdomen caused usually by a puncture wound, right? So you've got your guts are bleeding into your other guts, right? Is what he describes here. And then she dies as a result of massive infection. Mr. P pricked his finger while sewing up the abdomen. A dissection wound when death has followed perientitis is proverbially dangerous. It was so in this case for Mr. P nearly died of it. So his first experience with medicine is he takes this, doctor takes him to see the bloated corpse of this girl around his age and pricks his finger sewing her body up and nearly dies himself of infection. That's his first experience with medicine. There's a lot, there's a lot to take away from that. There's a lot to take away from that. Number one, I don't need to know how good looking the corpse is. Yeah, that was weird to tell. We're gonna be in a note, yeah. I don't need to know. Also, he's making up names. I don't know, Mr. Blank. Mr. P, Mr. Blank, come on, man. Oh, man. It's just death is such a constant in this period that you're like, yeah, if you cut your finger at any time, kid, and that's it, that's it. Normal day at the office, cut your finger, it's over. So days later, Galton would consider this the moment that ended his childhood. And like, yeah, that would pretty much be it. He's not really a kid after you go through that. No, you're done, you're done, you're done. You're an adult man now. Still, he took to work at the hospital, Gamelianoth, and was soon sewing up wounds and risking his own young life to do so. This is where he first encountered the mentally ill. In his autobiography, he describes a company and a researcher named William Bowman to an asylum in Vienna. So during like a break in like the hospital work calendar or whatever, he accompanies these two other doctors to Europe. This is his first time over to Europe and they go to an insane asylum. And this is, he's, they're doing some work and he's just sort of following them to get like experience in the broader medical field. And he writes this of the insane asylum. In those days, I was particularly shy and sensitive and a consciousness of even the least unconventional, unconventionality may be blushed to an absurd degree. And one of the female wards, a young bucsum and uncommonly good looking female lunatic dashed forward with a joyful scream. She clasped me tightly to her bucsum with both hands, calling me her long lost fritz, a teblow, amusement of the others, myself pink to the ears. So this is like really embarrassing to him 'cause this good looking girl who's mentally ill hugs him and is like putting her breasts up to him. And this is like one of the life moments he remembers most from his childhood. - God be honest, great, great statement. - Uncommonly good looking female lunatic. - Why? I know a lot of those. - How old was he? - He could have hit 17 maybe. - This is why teenager, this is why they should be just fucking going to the problem and shit, right? - Exactly, exactly. - He's like 16, 17 and he just can't help but to talk about how hot the corpses in the insane asylum patients he met on. - In a better world, he would have met this and commonly good looking female lunatic at a party and eventually she would have given him a mixtape and then he would have given her like a really shitty mixtape that he made. - Right, these days we call the manic pixie dream girl. - Yeah. - Turn back then, what is it? - Yeah, that's the first manic pixie dream girl. - I have a great time. - He meets his in a side view shirt, right? - I know, it should, it should. - I tell you what, there's a good road trip movie in this. - Oh, yeah. - So the trip to the continent is Francis's first experience abroad. He writes his older sister best during the visit. I have duly kept your precepts in mind about the immeasurable superiority of Englishmen. So he's a bigot and his family are bigoted but this is like a prescientific racist. They're just like, but we're better than everyone else that you meet because we're English. Never forget that we're better. Like as you travel the world, we're the best that everyone else is worse than us. Remember that Francis. This is how you may, I am surprised this didn't make a Hitler. 'Cause like, it just, I mean, I know it kind of did, but I'm more overt like a guy when I'm going like, yeah, I'm Hitler. 'Cause there's like-- - That's just some science is more primitive. - Yeah, telling like a teenager, you're better than everybody else. - You're the best by the way. - And then come with me to go see people at their worst and most vulnerable moments. Well, reminding you that you're better than all these people. - Yeah, of course that made him into the man who invented eugenics. - Yeah, that's a Hitler stew. - That's the very impressive Hitler stew. - Yeah, that's all the pieces of a tasty Hitler stew, right? They're all together. I'm gonna guess a lot of cumin in a Hitler stew. I'm not sure why. Anyway, during the same trip, you wrote this in the letter back home to his whole family. - I'm not. - Well, that motherfucker's not seasoning his food. - Yeah, you're probably right, Sophie. - You guys have, you've covered this Hitler fellow on this show. - We have, we've talked a little bit about Hitler. - He's not like your family. each bomb, yeah, that's our Thanos. During the same trip, you wrote this in a letter back home and it was entire family. There is nothing more useful than traveling. The more you see, the more you are convinced of the superiority of England. However, nothing could be so admirable as a German or Frenchman who loves his country. It must be a great and genuine patriotism to be able, but to prefer it. But like, wow, these must really be admirable patriots if they love their shitty ass fucking countries that suck so much worse than England. This is a funny big, it's first country in an unhinged way. I've already quoted from two major sources in these episodes. Pullmers by, or boomers biography of Francis Galton and Galton Zonato biography. But I found these quotes, the ones that I just read about him talking about how much better England is than everywhere. In a dissertation, Susan Schumacher wrote a Schumacher wrote for the University of Canterbury and Susan analyzed the growth and development of Galton's chauvinistic views during his world travel. So we'll be hearing from her several more times in these episodes. Most of the scientific training, Galton received as a doctor was in boiling various natural compounds to make tinctures and extracts. There's a lot of boiling, there's a lot of simmering. There's a lot of reducing things to vapors and then turning them into liquids again. That's most of medical science and there's a lot of making pills. You're mashing up different compounds to like make it. It's all we could do, right? It's like, you have fire in a pot. What do we do? We got a rock and we got some like this plant does something maybe it's medical, maybe just poisons people in a way we think is beneficial. There's no way to know like we're still very new with this science thing to give you an idea of how primitive shit was. This is something that Galton wrote later about his medical schooling. The stethoscope was considered generally to be newfangled, the older and naturally somewhat deaf practitioners, boo, booed and never used it. So like the most respected doctor's like a stethoscope, everyone's deaf. Why would that be useful or really scream at a lot louder? It's really funny to feel like why would we need to listen more or observe closer? That's not doctoring. These people are poor. You don't need to listen to them. Again, not long after this, a man is going to be how to do his death in the United States for being like surgeon should wash their hands. And the reason why he's how to do his death is that surgeons are like, but doctors can't give poor people illnesses. We're rich, right? That's literally the justification. We're a better class of person. Why would we have to wash our hands? That means we're the same kind of thing as a poor person. If we could get them sick, it's very funny, except for all the deaths. So working in their equivalent is days equivalent of an ER, which is what his early medical school is in. He's like basically working in an emergency room. Galton got a feeling for the common search of injuries of the day. Most nighttime emergencies were caused by burns because everyone's heating everything with like fire and oil. So if you get injured at night, it's probably because you like pour it a fucking burning lamp on yourself or something, right? It was a horrible time to be alive. I do this nightly to myself. Yeah, it would be awful. The next calm most common injuries were broken heads from brawls. That's what he how he described them at nighttime, right? Because people are drunk at a bar and they get into a fight, which he had to clean and stitch up as a wealthy child of a wealthy family in the Victorian era. He had grown up extremely conservative. And this colored his interpretations of all he saw. His biographer Michael Bulmer describes him as having little sympathy for liberal causes like chartism. The chartist movement was a working class attempt to reform UK politics that was active from 1838 to the late 1840s. It was a kind of proto socialist E, right? It's not perfectly accurate to view it that way. But it's certainly unlike the progressive side of things. And they supported some radical policies like a vote for every free man of sound mind over the age of 21. They also supported an end to property qualifications for ministers of parliament. So you didn't have to like own land to be in parliament and annual parliamentary elections so that rich people couldn't just like buy offices as easily because you'd have to do it more often, right? So woke shit. Woke shit, the chartists. Britain would ultimately adopt nearly every chartist reform. The only one they still haven't adopted to the present day is annual elections to parliament because again, it would make rich people less powerful. But only after the movement died, right? The chartists don't get anything until after they've been bashed into like put like fucking prison and stuff, right? And there are a lot of brutal riots in mob like police riots and stuff where these chartists are bashed half to death or to death in order to stop them from advocating for slightly better conditions. The height of the movement was in 1839, which is like one of the first years that Francis is working as a doctor. There were mass protests that the police cracked down on with standard brutality. All Francis noted at the time was many people were hurt. It was curious to observe the apparent cleanness of the cuts that were made through the scout by the blow of a policeman's round trungeon. But like, wow, when police people have to death, it's really clean. I love police violence. It's like it's better than bar violence. It's like they're blessing them somehow. What a clean, nice wound of the police left this dying man is now brain damaged forever. Yeah. I love how orderly police cross caused wounds are. That's Francis's conclusion. Bomber analyzed this statement in his biography of Francis Galton and concluded this comment reveal comment reveals a detached intellectual interest, a tendency to see people as cases to be studied. Or examples to be counted rather than as fellow humans to be sympathized with, which remained part of his character. And that is very important. He does not see people as people. He sees people as data points on a graph. Right. He's he would he would have been an effective altruism guy. If he came out today, like where he's like, well, this would this means that I have to we have to support 1000 millions of people dying and starving. But it will be better for people who don't exist yet, maybe in the future, based on these things I've, I've decided in my own head that don't necessarily correspond to reality. That would have been him today, um, in 1840, Francis traveled overseas on his own for the first time. His father had agreed to pay for him to study medicine in Germany over the summer, showing what it seems to be up, have been rare defiance. He instead decided to quote, make a dash and go as far as his dad's money would take him. So he's like, I'm not got a study in Germany. I'm fucking bouncing. I'm going to take my dad's money. I'm going to go to the Balkans. I'm going to go to Constantinople. And honestly, if I was a rich kid, I would definitely prefer rolling around the Balkans and Constantinople to a DJ going to the ER. Yeah, DJ for a while. Yeah, he took it in a residency of an Ibiza. Yeah, um, this means that for the first time, young Francis was confronted with large numbers of non white people. Once he winds up in Turkey, right? Schumacher's dissertation provides Francis's reaction to being in this environment. In a letter to his father, he begins, here I am at Constantinople among Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Franks. And further on in the same letter, then there are the Greeks. I never saw such black eyes in all my life. I should like to put one of them in a rage. They must look splendid, Ben. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I mean, this is going, this is going as good as you assume it would. Right. This guy around anybody who isn't white, he's going to be like, I don't like this. Yeah, I don't know why he's around and he's around a bunch of Greeks for the first time after just like reading the Iliad as a kid. He's like, I wonder what I, I bet they look great angry. I wish I could really piss off this Greek. So I can see them in their natural condition, which I assume the Iliad describes. Um, he continues in that letter. And here's where things get really dark. I saw the woman's slave market today. If I had 50 pounds in currency and my disposal, I could have invested in an excessively beautiful one, a Georgian. Some of the slaves had their nails died in Hina. Most of the black ones were fettered, but they seemed very happy dancing and singing and looking on complacently. Whilst a couple of the Turks were wrangling about their prices. So this guy, everything he writes, it makes me want to put him in a cage. Yeah, I want to tame him. Yeah, I don't want him. Yeah, interacting with society. No, no, a cave would have been the right thing. Plato's the cave is a great example of what we should have done to people like, uh, like this fucking kid, you know, lock him in a cave, let him look at some fucking projections and a fire on the wall and just let him, let him live and die there, you know, that. Or I want to give him access to Twitter. It's one or the other because he'd be like a real shit. He'd be Richard Henanio fucking like like Jesus, like, um, so it is kind of noteworthy too. His casual willingness to discuss buying a sex slave, right? Because Britain ended slavery in its possessions in 1833. Slavery's been over for like almost a decade in Britain when he's saying this. So that means, among other things, he doesn't care about that. He doesn't think that it's a moral to own a person as long as that they're not a white person, right? Especially if you want to have sex with them, that's a perfectly good reason to want to own somebody. You know, if he'd had more currency, he would have bought a sex slave. Later during his vacation in 1841, he wrote to his father about a very entertaining fellow traveler. He had a hooked nose, gold spectacles and was a member of the reform club and a na plus ultra radical. We had a red hot argument on politics, which I firmly believe neither of us knew anything about. Law based on how he describes Jewish people, else wise, I'm guessing that this was like a Jewish socialist that he meets, right? That's why he yeah. Yeah Anyway, great. Also the assumption that like well this guy's talking about politics I don't believe in we must neither of us must know anything about politics Maybe it was just you Francis. But to say that sounds like he lost the debate He says like he lost the argument says I guess I said some reasonable stuff Maybe we shouldn't own people. Yeah, what do we know? What do we know? Yeah, golden attended college in Cambridge is a break from his medical education to study mathematics His half-cous and Charles Darwin helped convince his father. This was a good idea Bulma calls his academic record here undistinguished Despite his later success success in statistics Francis was a mediocre math student by his own account He's like I wish I was better at maths and he suffered a mental breakdown in his third year This caused him to settle for a past degree rather than attempting to earn an honors distinction So he gives up on being like a great student and just is is focusing on just doing well enough to pass Because he can't really do much better his weakness is always going to be analytical mathematics That's what math people's I I'm not fit to judge him as a mathematician or anybody Right. I'm no math learner. I'm no math learner performance arts charter school I really know how to do math. I dropped out a fucking cult I certainly don't know how to do math But math people are like he wasn't very good at the analytical side of mathematics. That was his big weakness, right? He chose to take a past degree during his final year at Cambridge too Because he'd been drawn to extracurriculars and didn't want to take away from them And these extracurriculars are the humanities, right? Galma helps find found the historical society which is a debating group Form to oppose a different debating group the Cambridge Union, right? So he gets really into like arguing with kids about history other than As opposed to like learning how to be a better mathematician. Oh good. He likes to bait He likes to bait. He gets into they've been Shapiro sciences Everybody cool loves to bait. Yeah, everybody cool loves as a kid who loved to bait. I was not cool in school But you know who is cool in school That's right so big Dave and the sponsors of this podcast. Yeah, we're willing to argue with you honestly Don't listen to the things they want to argue about. It's it's not great. Probably raises On the new podcast solita We share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle I choose option B I'm Julie Beniero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita Trading the pity for possibility Every time I tried to be alone I kept meeting people and they were like You smiled at us not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world As it is and not the lies your soul about it. 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It can be an everything shower It can be putting your phone on do not disturb But sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff and understanding your patterns your boundaries Finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again I'm james beg the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast and each week We unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s from relationships and friendships to money anxiety confidence attachment Just becoming more comfortable with who you are unlike the quarter-life crisis Which is depicted as the collapse the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and corth of something When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves nobody else can take that from you So this self-care September don't just take care of yourself get to know yourself as well Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality welcome home This is pros society the weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for thought daughters pop culture obsessives And anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having I'm gonna have to look up this story So since from bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments Nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart pop culture Conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much. You're in the right place Listen to pro society on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts see you between the pages And we're back So talking Francis golden Um, he was a you know, he seems to have been a pretty popular guy at school. He makes a lot of friends He's very social. He's going to make a lot of influential contacts during this period with other wealthy kids Which is really what college is all about right and like that's the actual benefit of college even today There's not as much of a benefit if you're not making connections and friends with other rich people like that's definitely why a lot of kids Go to you know like Harvard or Cambridge today Several of his friends were budding historians and this is where we can document him first experiencing his earliest few feelings of race science Quote the subject of prehistoric civilization was novel even so late as the early fifties and was discussed independently from two different sides The line of approach that made one of his friends followed was to investigate the customs of the so-called Arian races The other of his friends The other line was by studying was by the study of living savage races and of such inferences regarding the past As might be drawn from implements and bones preserved in prehistoric graves and caverns So one of the issues with this and this is an issue that persists the modern day They're looking at so-called savage people which are in reality the indigenous people of the places they're colonizing and these are The indigenous people the places they're colonizing after they've generally been through apocalyptic changes, right? Especially the Americas Everything they're noting about the behavior of indigenous people is usually after like 90% of them die to disease And a bunch of the rest get enslaved and they're like the natural habitats of this group of people It would be like if the nukes go off and then some aliens came down here like four years after all Electricity is gone and were reduced to starving tribes and like in their natural society Human beings seem to huddle and search for cans fighting each other for like repose of cans and the and that's their natural human It's a truly traumatized and terrified of us. Yeah Not quite actually maybe maybe that's not a fair way to document and try and to try to draw inferences of the past Right. This is partly where the idea that like life was nasty. Brutus and short and ancient peoples had no technology And no knowledge of anything and no art. That's a lot of like prehistory Gets written about like people didn't know how to do war in the ancient era because they weren't really sophisticated enough I mean we do the shit like land of Americans too, which is like yeah you go in you brutalize and devastate a group of people and then you conclude based off The brutalization and devastation you did. Oh, they were pretty primitive actually. Yeah, I'm looking at them while with these burning huts like they couldn't even keep a hut not burning Yeah, yeah, all we did was light them on fire and look the natural the natural state of their homes is burning down Yeah, I mean, it is what people some people do about like the Middle East today, right where they're like wow Yeah, we've been at war with this place for forever and they're naturally pissed at us for reasons that we have nothing to do with yeah Cool stuff. I love how carbon an inference that is He goes on to explain that at the time most historians believe that the entire history of the ancient world was contained in the Pintitouche or the first five books of the Old Testament It was also practically supposed that nothing more of importance could be learned from the origins of civilization during classical times And was to be found definitely stated in classical authors so we say that like at his time the idea of prehistory is that like There's nothing really to learn. It's all in the Bible So the fact that his friends are talking about prehistory in any way are trying to glean anything more than is in these classical works is actually part of like a revolution evolution in historiography. The even as bad and as incomplete as it is to like look at these people and tribes that you've been fucking with for years and try to determine ancient civilization that's still an improvement over just being like, well, whatever is in the Bible and the Iliot is probably all we need to know about ancient peoples. And they actually know. - It's an incredible time when you talk about like that hit new thing called mass and science and prehistory. - Yeah. - Trying to barely understand the world, yeah. - So through his young adulthood, Galton is going to see Western antiquarians and archaeologists trying to grapple with the disconnect between evidence of ancient great civilizations of non-white people and their beliefs about white supremacy. This is like a major thing that early history is dealing with. Giving his waning interest in math education and his clear disinterest in practicing medicine, I don't know what Francis Galton would have done after graduation if he'd been a normal kid, but he wasn't. And the period of time which he has to think about doing something for a living is about to end. 'Cause his dad dies in 1844 and his dad is fucking loaded. He's so loaded that even though there's a bunch of brothers and sisters, the resulting inheritance that Francis gets makes him instantly so wealthy that he never has to work again, right? As long as he doesn't develop like a fashionable gambling problem, he's never gonna have to do anything. And so as soon as he gets his inheritance, Francis is like, "Well, I'm not gonna do anything practical anymore." Like that part of my life is over. It's time to fuck off and party for a while. Bulmer writes that Galton quote, "Immediately abandoned the idea of practicing medicine." And in 1845, he set up for the Near East to satisfy his desire to travel and sow his wild oats. Now, there's a, actually, I like to think back to a very good Rudyard Kippling line from the Poe Mandalay, or Mandalay Bay, I think it's the name of the poem, and he's talking about the British colonial possessions in a period of time a little bit after Galton's youth. And he's talking about what psychologically goes on and the men who travel over to the far east into Asia as part of the empire. Take me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain't no tin commandments and a man can raise a thirst. Galton is going over to the Middle East and North Africa to raise a thirst. He's not just going to fulfill his intellectual interest. He is going there to have sex with a lot of enslaved people. That's a big part of this. He's going to become a colicula. Yeah, he's going to do a lot of horrible sins. That's why he's going. How old is he? He's like 18 or 19. Yeah, when I was 22, some of my left time horrible things. I was hair about that. I was snorting drugs in a squat house. Yeah, exactly. And then immediately to nose drugs in a foreign country. Yeah. I was looking black tarhera went off of a guy's finger in rural India. Yeah, exactly. It's a miracle we're alive. If Inbal had been around, we might not be. I'm not. Honestly, it's an injustice that we're alive. It's like it's like, yeah, that's an affront to me too. God. So this first meant that Galton goes on what Bulwer describes as a shooting trip up the Nile and shooting trips are popular gatherings for the upper class and their stocked estates. And they would sometimes go on vacation for the same purpose. A bunch of wealthy armed white guys are going to like roam around on a boat and shoot every living creature. We see on the Nile for a couple of weeks. Just our blast and yeah, it's a shooting trip. We're gonna blast everything we can. It's one of those things like nowadays if I told someone I was going on a shooting trip. You know, they call the cops. Yeah, go on a shooting trip to where? Yeah. The Nile. Unfortunately, Francis was unable to convince any of his friends to go with him. Perhaps because they had to finish school or work and he didn't have to do that anymore. But on the steamer over, he meets two of his rich former classmates who are all in the same condition as he is. They're traveling with a butler and a cook to the Nile, right? And so they decide to all hang out together and Galton finds the group an Arab translator and an Arab boy to be their coffee bearer. His name was Ali, but they nicknamed him Bob because again, they're not gonna call this boy by his fucking name, right? Ali or Bob, it's the same amount of letter. It's just the same amount of letters. What does he care? Yeah. Just call him by his name. Call him by his fucking name. Isn't that a hard one to pronounce, guys? No. Early in the trip, they met a man that they first mistook for a poor Arab traveling in a small and dirty boat. Upon meeting, Galton describes how quote, like arrogant Britishers, he and his friends discussed loudly in English together, whether we should not pitch him into the river. So they start like joking, he doesn't speak English. Let's talk about throwing this strange Arab man that we just meet on the Nile into the river for no reason. But before they could quote, he shortly astonished us by speaking perfect French. And after a while, we discovered he was a much more interesting person than we had dreamed of. Now, first off, he's interesting because he's white. They find out he's a French guy. This person, this is another one of Galton's early connections to like a leftist, right? This French person, who they realize is actually really smart and interesting, is an exiled Saint-Simonian. And the Saint-Simonians are a kind of proto-socialist sect in France, and they get sort of cracked down on and made illegal, and he flees the country. And he winds up working for a local Arab leader. And this French guy, Armand, explains to Galton that quote, though he spoke English badly, he quite understood we had said among ourselves when we first met him and made me feel very small indeed. And the fact that he says that like, oh, I felt like such an asshole for like assuming something about this foreign man that turned out to be wrong based on his appearance. And for some people, this would have led to introspection and even change, right? Galton keeps getting confronted with these opportunities to be a better person, he will never take them. - Yeah, absolutely not. - He's telling the story like someone like getting a waiter's name wrong. Like, oh, can you believe it? But he was going to throw a man in the Nile. - Yeah, he was going to throw a man in the Nile, for looking different. He's such a prick. And in no point does he become a better person. He never grows because he's rich, he doesn't have to. I think that's a big part of it. Like, he never has to be afraid of anyone really. He should, but he never has to because of his money. Galton spent years in North Africa in the Middle East sowing his wild oats in his own words. There is evidence that during this period, he did things that later ashamed him. His biographers will note that almost none of his letters survive from the years right after his dad died. His first biographer, Carl Pearson, calls this period of his life the fallow years of his life because we don't have anything to know about them, right? 'Cause you're kind of, I believe, he destroyed the letters. He sent home. - Yeah, he did some stuff, but he was like, "Oh, I can do really stuff, yeah." - I don't want history to know about this. - This was his live journal years, where it's like, you know, we're all kind of thankful live journal isn't around anymore. - Yeah, thank God they took that down. Yeah. Now, I am not, I've had some fallow years of my own. So I'm not surprised that his great niece and future housekeeper told his biographer, Pearson, that she thought it, quote, "Best not to take any notice of those blank years, "I expect his mother tore up any letters of that date." Pearson merely notes that the letters perished. - Right, but no. - Yeah, now that is enticing. His more recent biographer, Bullworth, cites one rare surviving letter from this period that's a letter to Galton from his friend Montague Bolton. And Montague's one of the guys he's exploring Egypt in the North Africa and the Middle East with during this time, right? Montague's a traveling buddy. And later, sends a letter to Galton referencing their adventures together and writes, "What an unfortunate fellow you are "to get laid up in such a serious manner for, "as you say, a few moments enjoyment." That means he caught V.D., right? - Yeah. - And based on other things he wrote, we know that this is, maybe this is from a prostitute who was technically free. It's probably from an enslaved person. And so it's probably right by any just, like that's what the sexies have. It's horrifying, right? One reason for us to guess this is that at a later point in the same letter, Galton's friend Montague describes negotiating for a pretty enslaved girl from Abacinia or Ethiopia. He told Galton, "The Hanhuris are looking lovelier than ever. "The divorced one has been critically examined "and pronounced a virgin." Now, I don't know what the Hanhuris are, but the Huris are the infamous heavenly virgins in the Islamic afterlife. Now, there's a lot of debate as to what that actually means. I don't know why he would put Han there, but my guess is that that was a term he and Montague came up with for some local enslaved women who were worked at a brothel that they both knew. And this guy's saying one of them got inspected and pronounced a virgin. So his friend is talking about the prostitutes that they hung out with. That's what he's enslaved with, right? - The image I'm picturing putting him in keeps getting smaller and smaller. - Yes, and spikes in there now. - Yeah, we can kind of infer from this information that Francis Galton spent a fair amount of his recreational time during this period having non-consensual sex with enslaved people. There were hints of this reprobate period, even in Galton's autobiography. In a chapter about his visit to Cartoum, Egypt, he writes this. The saying was that when a man was such a reprobate that he could not live in Europe, he went to Constantinople. If too bad to be tolerated in Constantinople, He went to Cairo, and then s forward under similar compulsion. to Cartoon. Now, he's saying like when someone was so shitty, they couldn't exist in Europe, they go from Constantinople and then to Cairo and then to Cartoon, that's the exact route he route he took. He's talking about himself, right? -He's spitting booted out of Cartoon. -Yeah. -He's spitting because he's fucking doing all the drugs and having sex with all the insides. -He's on the crime spree. He's on the crime spree, but he's rich, so he doesn't get arrested. He just gets kicked off to the next city. And it's also worth noting that pretty much the only thing he writes about doing in Cartoon is meeting a bunch of slave traders. He's introduced to these slave traders by another Englishman, a Cambridge scholar, another Cambridge scholar, all of these guys hooring their way through the Middle East are Cambridge scholars. And this dude introduces, this is what he writes about the guy who introduces them to the slave traders. He easily held his own under difficulties, one hearts by his sympathy and could touch any amount of pitch without himself being defiled. He was consequently an admirable guide and then that sink of iniquity, Cartoon, right? He never got defiled by the fact that he was hanging out with the absolute worst people on the planet, right? The most degenerate and vile slavers, but he never got colored by it, just like me. You know, don't think too much about what I did in my free time as a kid. He had this to say about the people he met through these slave traders. A party of inward girls who had been captured on the borders of Abyssinia. These girls were delighted to talk to us of places known to them as well as ourselves. They seem Mary as possible at the prospect of being sold and soon finding each of them a master in a home. He writes a lot about how happy, specifically black enslaved people are at the idea of being enslaved. Whenever he writes about black people, it's to say they wanted to be enslaved. That's like the only time they come up in his biography, his autobiography. I should note that too. I mean, fucking people still try to say that today. It's like this real, incredible coping, right? It's like they loved it. Otherwise, I mean, I would be like, when a history is gay, the greatest monsters, and I can't be that, right? Yeah. And must have loved it. It had been that bad. Otherwise, I'm completely damned. Yeah. Yeah. I am a sinner beyond the ability to forgive. Yeah. What you were, Francis, and you know who else is beyond forgiveness? All of us. All of us. Yes. That's right. Unless we accept Jesus Christ into our hearts. That's where you're going with this, right? But I was, but not like the religious Jesus, but like the Jesus you say when like something fucked up that happens. You're like, Jesus Christ. You accept that, that like sense of resignation into your heart. I'm going to say that'll save you. I really admire that Jesus Christ is you, is a person and like an explodive like you can, it's hard to be right. Yeah. Yeah. We should do that. Yeah. You want David Bell. God David Christopher Bell. Yeah. That actually does work a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. The next time you stub your toes listeners, save David's name. You know, please. Oh, Dave, you got anything to plug? Is there ever a good time to mention that my ancestor was Alexander Graham Bell, a famous eugenicist? Yeah. It's a good time to mention. I was wondering if you're a chemo in this. I should do the Alexander Graham Bell episodes with you David. Yeah. I'll plug. So I have a podcast network. You do. Gamefully unemployed. I do a Tom Ryman. We don't talk about eugenics mostly. We're mostly about like movies like movies like Best of the Best with Eric Roberts. It's right. It's best of the best too with Eric Roberts, which I've been thinking about often. I have the box set coming. I want to plug the best of the best box set. But also, yeah, go to Patreon or just Google Gamefully Unemployed. GM and check it out. Unemployed. And I'm the head writer at some more news. That's right. I'll at movie hooligan. I'm blue sky. Why not? Yeah. Check them out. Check them out there. Check out Dave and Tom's podcast. Fox Molder is a maniac too. If you're if you're missing the ex files and you want to think a lot about Molder's behavior. Right. It's our one behind the best is basically for Fox Molder. To be honest, if Fox Molder had written an autobiography, there would be a period in the early 20s where he's bumping around the Middle East and North Africa, committing crimes against humanity easily. No question. We also, oh, we also have a new podcast about supernatural. It's our secret of that. It's about those beautiful Winchester boys. And it's called Kim Boos. Yeah. And it's a spiritual sequel to Fox Molder's a maniac. It turns out because they are also maniacs. It's a beautiful stuff. All right, everybody. Well, that's going to be it for us from behind the bastards and it should be it for all of you, you know, all of you listening to this podcast. Go and listen to the next podcast, which will happen at some point. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel youtube.com/at behind the bastards. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering the ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. Listen to solita on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask why am I like this? I'm james back host of the psychology of your 20s podcast and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions without us even realizing it aren't driven by what we truly want but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Listen to pro society on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.