Recently in Eugenics Category

In the comboxes below on one of the eugenics threads, there was a discussion over whether it is proper to use the verb "to breed" to describe human reproduction. I say it's inappropriate, because the use of a term more closely associated with animal husbandry frames the question of human reproduction in a way that diminishes, if not eliminates, what is uniquely human -- even sacred -- about human life. We should not accustom ourselves to thinking of human reproduction as merely a biological process, no different in kind than animal breeding, because that conditions us to think of humans as nothing more than animals.

Take a look at how President Theodore Roosevelt used the term in this letter of support to Charles Davenport, a prominent eugenics advocate:

I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding.

Cows, people, the slaughterhouse, Auschwitz...the language we use to discuss these issues matters immensely, because it frames them philosophically. It's not for nothing that in the 1920s, the German press was awash with the use of the word "parasites" to describe human beings that were socially undesirable from the overclass point of view. Once Germans became accustomed to seeing human beings as a biological pest, it wasn't hard to take them another step...and then another.

One would have thought that, given how the enthusiasm for eugenics in the early 20th-century America, and how it led to forced sterilization laws, as well as how eugenics theory led to the Holocaust in Europe, this question wouldn't even need asking. But obviously, it does -- and it does because a certain kind of liberal (and, I suppose, libertarian) now believes that as long as eugenics is voluntarily chosen, it's morally acceptable. Here, via Cheryl Miller, is Yuval Levin explaning what's wrong with that position:

But the great danger of the old eugenics movement was not that it empowered government. Far more dangerous was its undermining of our belief in human equality and our regard for the weakest members of our society. Any number of American thinkers, writers, and jurists, including H.L. Mencken and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., took the insights of Darwinism to mean that, in Mencken’s words, “there must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection,” and that society was morally obligated to rid itself of the congenitally ill and the disabled.

Today, the idea that it is morally acceptable to "improve" upon human life through genetic manipulation, paves the way for a time when it will be morally compulsory to do so. This way of thinking makes it possible to consider weak, the disabled, and anyone who deviates from the standards dominating society in a given time and place to be placed in a lesser category of humanity. If I were a gay person, or a disabled person, I would be very afraid indeed of the rise of "liberal eugenics."

As Levin recognizes, the moral harm of the eugenic idea lies not primarily in the use of state power to mandate and enforce eugenic measures. It lies in the way eugenics trains our minds to think of the value and dignity of human life being relative. You can be quite certain that the characteristics that define what the You-Know-Whats called "life worthy of life" will be determined by the powerful in any given society, at the expense of the weak. To accept that life is not worthy of life in and of itself is to open the door to hell. I'm quite serious.

The thing is, every single one of us struggles to keep the full humanity of our neighbors in front of us every single day. No one -- conservative, liberal, apolitical -- is immune from the temptation to denigrate the humanity of the Other. Look at the phrase ~tv used in a combox comment -- "Why is it such a horrible thing to ask people who shouldn't breed to not breed?" If the point is that people shouldn't have children that they're not capable of caring for, that's a reasonable position to hold. But how do we determine who "shouldn't" breed? That's where the eugenic mentality comes in. Given that based on his frequent comments that the state should be extremely generous with welfare benefits, ~tv presumably believes that the government is obliged to subsidize unlimited childbearing among the poor. So by what criteria would he (or anybody) decide that a person, or class of people, shouldn't have children.

More chilling is the attitude contained in his language. People don't "breed"; animals do. The inhumanity inherent in his choice of words tells us a lot.

I'd say that most of us, even all of us, at some time or another have thought that the world would be a better place if only That Sort of Person would quit having children, or would cease to exist. And maybe, from a coldly rational point of view, we would be right. But it's very, very easy to slip from that observation to the conviction that because That Sort of Person doesn't meet our moral or aesthetic criteria, that they are in some sense deserving of being treated as less than fully human -- and even a menace to society.

I once visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and saw in the exhibit how the Holocaust didn't just appear out of nowhere. It began with the idea that the "health" of German society was a paramount social value. And then the eugenicists started their work, discussing how the "unfit" -- mental defectives, the disabled and others -- harmed the overall health of society. And then the Jews and others became identified as "parasites" on the body politic -- that is, an entire class of human beings were likened to animals. Little by little, German society became conditioned to see its own progress toward a state of greater social health depended on ridding itself of classes of people whose failure to meet the overclass's standards rendered them not only less than human, but a danger to the majority. And then came the Final Solution.

Look, I'm not saying that every question having to do with genetics and human life can be reduced to the Holocaust. But surely, given that the greatest stain on humanity's conscience in mankind's history occurred within living memory, and its philosophical roots lay in the idea that there can be human beings whose very existence is immoral -- well, surely all of us are obliged to proceed on this front in fear and trembling, and with extreme caution. If we proceed at all. I have far, far more trust in the wisdom of the Catholic Church and Protestant fundamentalists in this matter than I do in the judgment of scientists and other experts who can only see the future, but never the past.

I'll give the final word to Yuval Levin again:

The challenge of eugenics was, and is again, a challenge to our egalitarianism. That is what lies at the heart of the abortion debate, and of the larger debate about emerging biotechnologies. These arguments are not about when a new human life begins—an empirical matter not in real dispute—but about whether every human life is equal. That question is a perfectly serious one, and there are defensible positions on both sides. But too many American progressives have answered in the negative without thinking through the consequences. And increasingly the reasons they give are not liberal reasons—reasons of liberty and personal choice—but scientific reasons, be it the great promise of some very particular avenue of medical research, or the instrument readings that demonstrate Down’s or another genetic condition.

These progressives are, in this sense, new eugenicists. That doesn’t mean they would abide Nazi medicine or forced sterilizations. But it does mean they abide scientific selection to eliminate the weakest among us.

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.