Tromp and Racism
Not a typo.
Yesterday, I spent a little time in Google Book Search trying to track down a primary source for the claim that Cornelis Tromp died remorseful, dreading his punishment in the afterlife. I got lazy and gave up, but not before stumbling onto another interesting mention of Tromp: Francis Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius. Galton advocated for a eugenic breeding program to get higher-quality people, and studied historical geniuses to help make his point. Guess who one of his geniuses is?
I don’t want to be too unfair to Galton, just a little unfair, so I’ll mention in passing that he did a lot of rigorous statistical study (a pioneering concept at the time) of the question of how hereditary genius was. I’m sure he also somewhat acknowledges, somewhere in his book, the criticisms I’m about to make. (I’m not going to read the whole thing, because, again, lazy). He just seems to me to’ve been blind to exactly how severe the problem with his methodology was, in a revealing way.
Galton on Tromp
A good chunk of Hereditary Genius is just an alphabetical list, with quick bios, of various historical figures who were related to each other, with a note about how each had similar kinds of “high ability.” He claims that the Churchill line shows evidence of a hereditary talent for war, which I have to begrudgingly acknowledge seems kind of like a successful advance prediction.
Mostly though it’s kinda inane. In the entry right before Tromp, he discusses Titus, an emperor of Rome whose father (you’ll never believe this) was also an emperor of Rome. What are the odds??? There’s a surprising number of entries like this. The Princes of Orange make it into the list too, for example, for their hereditary talent at primogeniture.
What’s going on here? Galton wasn’t stupid, at least not the way he defined intelligence. What he was, was privileged and bigoted, without the cultural tools to realize how deeply the biases were rooted. When he read about people who inherited positions, money, and/or fame and didn’t completely screw it up, he didn’t take seriously enough the hypothesis that they were only doing what the average person would’ve done with the same advantages. After all, he was a child of privilege from an illustrious family, and it still felt to him like he was succeeding on his own merits.
Tromp’s a tiny piece of evidence that Galton was misattributing the effect of privilege to that of genetics. Here’s the entirety of the entry:
Celebrated Dutch admiral, who obtained that rank, on active service, aet. 33. His professional eminence was beyond all question, though scarcely equal to that of his father.
I’m not too bothered that he skips over all the treason and atrocities. He’s writing about ability, not monstrosity. It’s the “beyond all question” part that gets to me. How can you be so confident about the skill of an admiral? A violinist, maybe. But admirals…it’s like saying that someone who coached a winning sports team is, “beyond all question,” a great coach. They might be! But maybe they just had a great team.
Let’s consider the null hypothesis—admirals have no effect on outcomes, but ones who win a bunch of coin flips in a row become celebrated. Children often have the means and motive to take up their parents’ profession, so some of the lucky admirals will spawn baby admirals, some of whom themselves will get lucky. In fact, since they’re usually inheriting the same navy that won under their dad, they’re more likely than average to have the stronger navy in any conflict they lead.
Here’s where if I were doing actual science, I’d check whether Galton’s data shows a stronger effect size than the null hypothesis predicts. But I’m doing weird pun-inspired historical anecdotes this week, so instead I’m just going to take a deeper dive into this one.
Tromp: Failing Upward While His Ships Failed To The Bottom of the Ocean
Did Tromp get an initial head start because of his famous admiral father? Unambiguously, yes. His first command was literally given to him by his father. Tromp also seems to have had an overconfidence as a commander, born of his belief that it was his God-given right to succeed his father. Overconfidence usually gets you killed, but if you manage to survive it, it distinguishes you instead.
Tromp’s father was killed in battle, by a sniper on the ship of his opposite number in the Anglo-Dutch War, Admiral William Penn. Penn, incidentally, left a sizable legacy to his son, who used it to found Pennsylvania. (Wow, two famous people and a state in the same family!) By this point, Tromp Junior’s name had been in enough battle records that, win or lose, he was considered seasoned enough to literally inherit the admiralty.
So I don’t think he needed much ability to acquire his “professional eminence.” But maybe he demonstrated it anyway? Nah. Not if you read his service record while being unaccountably prejudiced against people with his name, anyway, instead of for them.
Tromp’s strategy in every battle was to try to get his own ship upwind of the enemy fleet’s, which is often a good idea but not always wise or even possible. This very frequently led to his ship getting sunk, captured, or disabled. E.g. in the Four Day’s Battle, he averaged a ship a day. He’d delegate “going down with the ship” responsibilities to the captain, as was his right. Then he’d be rescued, take over another ship in the squadron, and do the same thing again. If he eventually made it upwind, he’d spend the tactical advantage to launch another aggressive assault.
But being an admiral is more about directing the squadron than how you choose to command one ship, right? Well, he didn’t do great there either. In one egregious “you had one job” moment, at the Battle of Lowestoft he was one of three different officers who each ordered their three ships to declare themselves the flagship, leading to utter chaos and a crushing defeat. That republican prime minister, Johan de Witt, made himself a deadly enemy by firing Tromp. He gave his job to the more effective Michiel de Ruyter, whose father was a lowly sailor. de Ruyter ascribed Lowestoft to Tromp’s defects of character, while Tromp described de Ruyter as, well, the son of a lowly sailor and therefore too common to take command. Most elite Orangists were Orangists because of realpolitik pragmatism, but I suspect Tromp was very invested in the idea that you should always be given your father’s position.
Tromp later claimed that Dutch losses would've been much greater in that battle, but for a heroic rearguard action he personally led. Nobody else was in a position to confirm or deny this part of the story. I don’t know whether it’s true, but I feel like I do know why people believed it. Famous war hero dad.
Also, it was while acting as admiral that he secretly used his ships to export luxury goods for his own profit. Does that count against his ability as an admiral? It’s at least evidence that he was given a lot of leeway, since he was caught pretty quickly but not permanently drummed out of service.
So, in summary: Tromp was quite possibly the worst admiral people had ever heard of. But they had heard of him.
Breeding A Race of Tromps
Galton’s conclusion from success stories like these? We have to make sure all of the lesser races die off, to reduce the surplus population and allow hereditary genius to thrive. He of course cites Malthus, another recent villain on this blog, to argue this point. (Mary Shelley and her genius parents, one of whom was Malthus’s ideological opposite number, are notably absent from Galton’s list, although her poet husband gets a passing mention. Mary didn’t inherit a Y chromosome, I guess.)
It’s easy and understandable to just feel the outrage and repugnance and walk away. We know that this logic can lead to the very worst places, and Galton wasn’t shy about taking us there. But I want to generalize to a slightly broader point. Galton’s working definition of virtue is entirely divorced from moral character, remember, and at some point he seems to have forgotten that. Successful people usually owe their opportunities, and often their entire success, to ancestral acts of violence. When you automatically, “beyond all question,” attribute differences in outcome to differences in ability, you’re legitimizing those crimes. It’s like you’ve promised to repaint and issue new license plates to any car that comes into your shop, no questions asked. Not only are you making yourself an accessory to grand theft auto, you’re also incentivizing it by showing people they’ll be able to get away with it.
People took Galton seriously. I doubt that they managed to literally breed Trompism into the general population. But they certainly created a social environment that fostered it.
And people are still drawn to scientific racism. I suspect a tendency to bigotry is encoded pretty deeply into our DNA, and we find all sorts of ways to justify it. Scientific racists rarely seem to put much weight on heterosis, the observation that the amount of genetic diversity in one’s ancestors tends to be a better predictor of outcomes than who those ancestors were, the more diverse the better. Regardless, I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to think in these terms, because the path of least resistance in our brains goes from eugenics to genocide. I’ll be just irresponsible enough to note that miscegenation was illegal in some parts of the U.S. until 1967. It only took one generation after their existence was legalized for Barack Obama, Beyoncé, and Tiger Woods to take over the world. I don’t want to make the same mistake Galton did, though—after all, your parents’ ability to flout prejudice is correlated with inheritable wealth. Beyoncé’s father was big in the music industry. Still. She’s pretty talented in her own right. And you don’t have to take her, or anyone’s, word for it.