From bad to worse

Raymond Fancher

• Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 by Daniel Pick
  Cambridge, 275 pp, £27.50, October 1989, ISBN 0 521 36021 8
• Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 by Paul Weindling
  Cambridge, 641 pp, £55.00, October 1989, ISBN 0 521 36381 0

More than three centuries ago. Sir Thomas Browne noted ‘the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present’. He added that these nostalgic declaimers seem always to have been present, and indeed one can find notable examples of them from virtually all periods of human history. Horace’s lament – ‘Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler; we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still’ – is still echoed today by those who see society in dangerous decay from causes as diverse as Aids and abortion, pollution and punk rock, drugs and deficit spending. Because these attitudes have been expressed continuously across the centuries, Browne did not take them seriously, and argued that they merely indicated ‘the community of vice’ across all stages of history.