Notes on eugenics as an exciting and rewarding profession
The two main fallacies in the criticism of eugenics as it's been attempted in recent history are:
1. the baby-with-the bathwater dismissal of "natural" eugenic processes, as being no better than the "race-improving" practices of the various schools of eugenic thought. So that the conflict over evolution being taught in schools takes on a complexity it didn't seem to have at first, and the vicious antipathy toward and urge to dominate the wilderness and everything in it, that has given us a world careening toward system-crash, becomes more explicable.Cattle are a eugenically-delivered resource, dogs, pigs, chickens, oranges, lettuce, corn or maize - all of them are the product of selection and cull, of the improvement of stock toward a definite practical goal. In the case of crops and domestic food animals the goal is easily-defined and clear, in the case of slaves it's much harder to see, especially for the slaves themselves. Blind obedience enforced by immediate punishment and a growing sense of incapacity - and a fearful sense of something out there unseen and threatening that you're being protected from by an authority that can't be seen all that clearly either. And it takes most of a human life, or a lot of gathered-up stories from those who came before, to place the pattern on its template, to see the changes as they've been laid out, and accomplished.
Part of this fallacy is the arrogant assumption of human rational processes as unquestionably superior to any the billions of years old "natural" world has running.
2. The refusal to distinguish between a eugenic desire to improve the race itself, a kind of scientifically-empowered altruism, and the urge to eugenically improve a race of docile and obedient slaves, a sub-race as it were, to benefit other, more directly self-eugenicized individuals.
Part of this fallacy is the lacunae around the eugenic purpose of genetic modification, of prosthetic improvements as being a kind of technological eugenics, and the unwilled but measurably present anti-eugenics of the removal from the human reproductive cycle of those who cannot adapt to the narrowing parameters of an increasingly artificial way of life that requires increasing amounts of passivity and thoughtless obedience in order to survive comfortably.
Most Americans are now incapable of being freeholders, of raising their own food, of existing outside the protective embrace of a controlling central authority. And they know this, so they accept authority on its terms, knowing also they have no real choice.
We have the obvious and simple diagram of global climate change > the automobile and its toxic emissions > and the automobile and oil industries being the most powerful economic entities in the US > which is in turn the most powerful state on the planet at this time.
People accept that they may soon become extinct as earthly creatures, or that their lives may become chaotic and brutally primitive (essentially the very things that are pointed to to justify the poisons of industrial civilization, that it saves us from living like that, have now become a likely outcome of civilized living), knowing that it's the result of daily mass burning of gasoline, but feeling helpless to stop, because they've been made to fear the consequences of stopping.
Now they're being made to fear the consequences of not stopping.
The tension that results from that double-bind of cognitive dissonance means the less intelligent, the more docile, the weaker in character, will be ready prey for any scam that promises them a way out that doesn't require sacrifice to accomplish.
So we can continue to drive increasingly more powerful and gas-consuming cars and trucks without a sense of guilt that we're "destroying the world", because it simply means that Jesus will be here soon and we can abandon this sinful place, and go with him to heaven, to our true home.
Once slaves have been crippled by their captivity, they become more tractable - an ancient lesson. All animals weigh the outcomes of their actions, cognitively or instinctively, and make rational decisions about the costs/benefits.
We're entering a period when that's becoming impossible for us to do without embracing the unthinkable. Everyone wants to retain what comfort they have in their lives, and almost everyone wants to get more. What we're facing is the opposite entirely, a time of sacrifice and self-denial, when the best will give up what they have for those who may come after. Which is a kind of eugenics, but it's a eugenics whose template is emotional and spiritual, not rational, not the product of cold intellect and autistic logic. And it's voluntary.
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Further notes:
The insistence of virtually everyone who mentions eugenics that it is a "pseudo-science" is a misdirection. What they mean is it's inhuman science. Obviously eugenic breeding of dogs results in dogs with qualities people want them to have, that isn't pseudo-science, it's plain old science. The problem with calling it inhuman science is that would open the door to examining other aspects of modern scientific research and application to determine whether they were also inhuman. The people that call eugenics pseudo-science are incapable of facing the horrors of a modern animal "shelter", where thousands of dogs and cats are killed monthly. And even less able to take on the responsibility of advocating or condemning animal research, the laboratories filled with tormented creatures, including especially primate research with its manifold benefits to humanity. It's there the problem is clearest, so of course it's precisely there no one wants to go.
Calling these practices inhuman science is more accurate, and it removes the comfort of ambivalence from the positions most people would like to take.
What needs pointing out is that enough progress in these methods, and enough accumulated benefits, will create an inhuman society. What needs to be stressed in that is that no matter how depraved, no matter how removed from the human it gets, there will always be a median, a middle, a majority who owe their lives and their security to the way things are, and recognize that debt whether they will admit to it or not.
So that where once there was only a freakish misfit torturing animals to see what happened, eventually there's essentially the same individual as a champion of his people. It's just that those people are no longer recognizably human, or wouldn't be, except that they've gotten rid of the ones whose humanity makes them look bad.
We're somewhere in the middle of that change, dangerously I think, too much of the evil of this time is done silently and invisibly, away from the sight of its increasingly dependent and naive beneficiaries.
The points here that matter are:
A. The natural eugenic processes that gave us large brains, agile bodies, immune systems, and the ability to create complex social networks, are being thwarted at every turn, without question. It's a given that all people must be kept alive at all times, death is the enemy always. Even though it was that kind of death that gave us the attributes we most value. This is why evolution is so threatening as an idea to those who see it as opposed to divine truth, as "Godless".My personal view of this is far more cynical than these words make clear, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say as firmly as possible that the mistake of the eugenics movement per se, as practiced here in the US in the 20th century and in other parts of the world, Nazi Germany most egregiously, as well, is that it formed around a human view of what eugenic selection should be. A fatally limited view, with the viewers' own genetic makeup at its core. It was a plan made by men, and carried out by men; the selfishness of that vision deferred to their children, a kind of altruistic meta-selfishness. The arrogance of that stance is almost more appalling than the practice of it.
B. There is a eugenic process at work even in the midst of that seemingly a-eugenic morality - at the same time normal people are appalled at the idea of selecting some individuals for survival and eliminating others as unfit, social standards and ways of living, technological dependency and imperatives create a landscape that selects and eliminates certain kinds of people steadily, so that the median American now is very different from the median American of two hundred years ago, and most especially 600 years ago, even though that process is unintentional and unremarked on. It's still happening, it's eugenic, and the people who feel themselves to be at the heart of the norm are the primary beneficiaries of it. The norm has shifted, though the dogma says the norm never shifts, that what it is to be human is always the same through millenia. The center of that, even though it's changed, even though the center now was the margin 10,000 years ago, feels itself to be "normal". The people who are at the center of things feel that they should be there. Always, no matter who it is, or when.
It's in their interest to have the process be ignored, and it increases the invisibility of it to have such strong taboos against the idea of intentional eugenics.
C. What we have is not a conflict between eugenics and compassion, it's a conflict between different templates for the inevitable eugenic process. It's a conflict between definitions of what eugenic should mean.
D. The inhuman scientific research of the last hundred years has brought us to the edge of physical immortality. Anyone who thinks that "blessing" will be handed out on street corners to all who want some is a dupe. That is a direct thwarting of evolution. Yet it's bleeding-edge science.
Making the problem go away by pretending there are not kinds of people - that there are not degrees of fitness - is childish and cowardly, and it actually empowers those men with their twisted schemes of improvement. Pretending that any individual or group can recognize and make the distinction between fit and unfit is just as cowardly, though not childish.
The reason I think this is more than just intellectually interesting is that that absence of recognition, that we are living out a kind of eugenic process right now, though it's invisible and unrecognized, is enabling, right now, the survival of a particular kind of human at the expense of others, and that its result is the death of nobility, the loss of the beauty of the human animal, its place taken by something craven and manipulative, and ultimately inhuman.
