geniquity, n. the degree to which an individual's life prospects seem fated by their genetic material; genetic justice.
From the Latin genus meaning kind or rank, and aequus, meaning level or even.
The notion of geniquity appears to have arisen simultaneously in a number of heavily class-based societies throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the growing interest in science and the rise of evolutionary theory occurring at that time, a modern-minded, educated portion of the populace clamoured to apply these concepts within the world as they saw it.
Geniquity was one such application. The term was first recorded in written English in 1771 by Harold Batten-Batten, a wealthy estate owner, would-be intellectual and London dilettante. Batten-Batten proposed that the reason why he had enjoyed a charmed life while others suffered the apparent vaguaries of fate was geniquity.
"I was," he wrote in a paper explaining his theory, which was presented to the London Scientific Club in November of that year, "born to indulge, to enjoy, to succeed. My genetic material has pre-destined me to goodness."
Despite an outcry from the community's scientific quarter -- most of whose members scorned the London Scientific Club as a coterie of idle rich men who wished they'd achieved something with their lives -- the concept of geniquity took hold within the less intellectually rigorous upper eschelons of society.
It was called on as an explanation for all manner of injustices, many of them wholly malevolent, for the next hundred and fifty years. The concept finally lost support in the end days of the Second World War, and after a series of entirely fruitless experiments had been conducted across the European continent, starting in the 1850s and ending around 1893, in an effort to prove the concept.
Says the great Manfred Sayer, social historian, in his final opus In Our Nature: Europeans and the Dawn of Science (Faber, 1913):
"We must conclude that the popularity of the idea was due in large part to the guilt of an upper class whose then-living members had done little at all to achieve or maintain either their own prospects, or those of the society in which they lived.
"Geniquity made a convenient, if erroneous, explanation for the circumstances of an entire segment of society, and one that absolved its constituents of any personal responsibility to act or even think differently about the social order. It makes a fascinating study for those interested in what we call "class.""
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