Eugenics? What eugenics?

Ross Douthat is properly cheesed off at Kevin Drum for affecting befuddlement that conservatives would accuse liberals of promoting a new eugenics. Of course they do, all in the name of Progress. This is nothing new. According to that notorious right-wing rag Salon.com:

Among the many concerns that captivated the American educated class early in the last century, few were thought to be as urgent as the threat posed to the nation by sexually insatiable female morons. This may sound silly; today, our fear of morons is rather abstract, and on a national scale confined mostly to whomever is the current resident of the White House. But a hundred years ago, morons were public enemy No. 1, seen as a drain on the nation's resources and a grave danger to its stability. The situation was most keenly appreciated by progressives -- scientists, businessmen, feminists and liberal politicians -- who, as even the best of us sometimes do, feared that within a short time, the nation would be overrun by simpletons.

But how do you solve a problem like the moron? These poor people, for one, weren't easy to spot. "Feeblemindedness," the medical condition from which morons suffered, was chiefly manifested by subtle, difficult-to-diagnose symptoms, such as poor judgment and a susceptibility to deviance. The only way to tell if you were dealing with a certifiable moron -- an actual medical term -- was by administering an intelligence questionnaire (an early version of the IQ test), which scientists believed could accurately assess a patient's "mental age." Unlike idiots and imbeciles (who were characterized by significant, obvious mental defects), morons, who were grown-ups who showed mental ages that were far below their physical maturity, might do well in school, they might hold down jobs, and they might even manage to raise children -- but all this was to be thought of as a ruse, because sooner or later, they'd go astray.

As the journalist Harry Bruinius explains in "Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity," his comprehensive new history of the American eugenics movement, the problem wasn't just that morons were given to crime and poverty; because feeblemindedness was a genetic condition passed on from one generation to the next, their children, and their children's children, and on and on, were similarly suspect as well. Of particular concern were the afflicted women, in whom scientists had found the symptoms of feeblemindedness more pronounced. Female morons gave in to their sexual urges more quickly than feebleminded men, and they sometimes deceived normal men into consorting with them; in addition, they were "hyper-fecund," as doctors termed their apparent tendency to become pregnant easily. Put this all together, as many smart Americans did, and you had a big problem on your hands: an extremely fertile, extremely needy, apparently permanent underclass.

It's lately become fashionable to reckon with growing ignorance among one's countrymen by threatening to emigrate to Canada; for American intellectuals of an earlier generation the more obvious solution was forced sterilization. At the dawn of the medical age, when scientists were just beginning to discover both the evolutionary basis to biology as well as painless, "humane" procedures to render humans infertile, it was the nation's rationalists who hit upon the idea of sterilization as a way to solve the problem of multiplying morons, Bruinius explains; the main opposition to the horrific idea came from religious fundamentalists. [Emphasis mine -- RD]

The thing that irritates me so much about what the left insists on terming "the Republican war on science" is that, as Ross has noted before, the left's insistence on terming policy preferences as a battle between the forces of Light and Darkness. As Christine Rosen has written, this is precisely the rhetorical strategy the early 20th century eugenicists employed -- and they got liberal clergymen to carry their ethical water for them.

Whenever a liberal accuses conservatives of making war on science because the conservative opposes embryonic stem-cell research, I want to know: do you, my progressive friend, oppose the Tuskegee experiment? If so -- and I certainly hope you do -- does that make you an enemy of science? Or does it merely reflect the perfectly rational and civilized belief that the pursuit of science, like every other human endeavor, must be circumscribed by moral limits. The quest for scientific knowledge is not self-justifying. The difference between liberals and conservatives on this question is not between Light and Darkness; it's rather a matter of where we draw the line at what scientists are not allowed to do.

If there is to be no line drawn, ever, because science must be allowed to follow its passions wherever they may lead, on what grounds do you stop this medical scientist?

In the end, progressives have all kinds of moral reasons for objecting, and thank God for it. But they should knock off the pretense that they represent Reason against Ignorance when conservatives object to scientific procedures they find immoral.