The effort to transform human nature through the use of art is what I have called the modernist moral project. By this solemn phrase I mean to suggest only an important tendency within modernism. I am not proposing a monolithic model. Certainly it is true that the modernists played expressively with scientific concepts, exploiting opportunities for rhetorical advantage as they arose, and exploring new scientific vistas with the freedom of the imagination. But this combination of experiment, intuition, and risk, which makes the most subtle demands on our ears, is lost in the work of critical successors who put theory before literature. These successors lead the modernist moral project to a dangerous end: they legislate and enforce the perverse dogmas of pseudo-ethical anti-naturalism.

It should be borne in mind that modernism was contemporary with the eugenics movement, which prospered at major universities in the US and Europe. The modernist moral project changes eugenics into an image of itself, as it fuses nature and art – ethics and aesthetics – into a technology of the void, a cosmic process that forgets humankind. Eugenic Man was only a more perfect version of the Yahoo. He was not a new species. In the words of its founder Francis Galton, the idea of modern eugenics was to “co-operate with the works of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races.” Whether in its weeding or its fertilizing mode, eugenics sought only to recoup what had been lost.