Affluent People Seldom Imagine Themselves As Being Candidates For Eugenic Elimination, Funny That

There has been some confusion as to the point of my post Saturday.

Richard Dawkins' breezy assertion about the desirability of a specific kind of people not being alive and among us, based on their utilitarian value in adding "happiness" to the world, is clearly a standard of judgement he would never apply to his class or himself.   He's not alone in that, it is the general rule with those who make breezy assertions about the "value" of other people and their lives that they would never want to be subjected to their methods of toting up the worth of those lives.  Or they could never imagine someone not seeing their lives expressed as "things" exactly as they do, themselves.

It was happenstance that I'd written about the measured and documented debility that atheism was associated with last week.  Lower life expectancy, increased illness and health problems, matched with lower birth rates.   That, my dear readers is exactly the measure of "fitness" that is the basis of Richard Dawkins' science.  Natural selection is measured in just those terms, fitness and reproductive advantage. In his own terms, the high priest of atheism,  Richard Dawkins',  own identity group is of less utilitarian and biological value than the religious people he so disdains.  I am sure an economist could come up with some alleged measure of the cost of atheism to society in terms of healthcare costs, figuring in the lower reproduction rates, early death rates, etc. to come up with some numbers of alleged informative value, of the kind that someone would assume was possible to measure the "value" of other human groups, including those who have Down Syndrome.

The fact is, that when you begin to practice evaluating people, their "fitness" to live - to put it plainly, the desirability of their not living or, more plainly, BEING DEAD - or their value in economic terms, you have made looking at yourself and your group justifiable.  I would say that, considering the history of that kind of economic evaluation of human lives which has had a horrifically devastating effect on people, depriving billions of people of "happiness" that it is a moral imperative to hold the people who do that to their own methods of evaluation.   And, unlike the practice of that in the past, we must not allow them to rig the vectors considered to their own advantage.   

In my long research into the issues surround eugenics, Darwinian natural selection applied to the human population,  I saw, at each and every step, there was a rigging of what was considered to be of more and of less value.  It wasn't unpredictable that the white, Norther European, university trained, aspirants to or members of the upper economic classes, would set things up the way they did and still do today*.  The common attributes of that class were given a positive evaluation, generally not an explicit number but a tacitly stated variable or constant value.   The things given a negative value in the calculation of worth was also predictable.  That those with dark skin were to be regarded as of lesser value was a given from the very beginning.   The entire question of what .... NO WHO was worth keeping alive or allowed to be born was a question of class and ethnic identification, subject to a few outliers of that group due to birth defects and the such.

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Of course the issue of abortion is inevitably tied up with this proposed eugenic elimination of named populations of people.   And, though it will inevitably be a matter of making the most precise and subtle distinctions, which will inevitably be misunderstood, both unintentionally and intentionally, that is inescapable.

For a woman who is presented with the information that the child she is carrying will have Down Syndrome, her decision of whether or not to have an abortion will generally depend on her ability to imagine what the future of the child and her life with it will be.  If, perhaps as with most people, she has never known someone who has Down Syndrome and seen that many of them have happy lives and families who love and cherish them, it may be hard for her to imagine that as a possible outcome.  Richard Dawkins would seem to not encourage imagining that as a possibility since he, actually, presented the abortion of such a child as a moral imperative.

That such a child may bring less pain, at less cost to society than a stinking rich trust fund brat of a wealthy family who sends their spawn to Oxford, Cambrige, Harvard or Stamford, before they go on to be a titan in the military-industrial-banking complex would seem to be incomprehensible to him and many of the "liberal" commentators at places like Salon magazine.  If I were in the business of making those kinds of off the cuff calculations of utilitarian fitness to be born, based on the "happiness" contributed or destroyed, I'd feel morally obligated to insist that such pregnancies never be allowed to come to term.  But I'm not in that business.  Odd that those scientists who are seem to miss the opportunity to apply their science to a class who have added so much suffering and cost to the world.

Though I would hold that the state has no legitimate right to regulate or control the bodies of women and that the legitimate interest of the state certainly doesn't extend past the skin, it is inevitable that the reasons women have abortions will have consequences in societies where they live.  The frequent choice to abort girls is certainly a sign that the exercise of rights exist in the social and cultural milieu in which that exercise happens, not on the basis of an assumption of equal value of the two genders.  The ability science gave parents to determine the gender of the child being carried has, in many cases, prevented the births of, mostly, girls and favored the birth of boys.  That has been mentioned in some of the response to Dawkins' declaration, in those socieites, it is very easy for parents to imagine the "happiness" value of girls as a negative number and, so, many millions of girls who would have been there aren't.

There would seem to be no indication but that the results have been a disaster for the rights of women and their status in those societies.  While it may be hard for women in North America or Europe to imagine the paradox of a right they regard in the abstract informed by their experience of life here, the picture they come up with is not universally relevant.   It is certainly true that the casual ability to determine the gender of a fetus and the ability to have an abortion will lead to men and other women forcing women to have abortions they would, otherwise, have chosen not to have.

Asserting that right to choose abortion,  which I agree with,   doesn't do a thing to change the facts as they are.  What is chosen is not always  a matter of free choice anymore than a choice is made on the basis of full information.  In the case of the choice or whether or not to abort a child with Down Syndrome,  I would expect the choice is generally made on far less information.   Dawkins' and so many others are of no help at all in adding clarity.

It is so easy for those who are addicted to the methods of the social sciences, such as Dawkins, to see entire human beings, entire human lives, entire human groups as the most vulgar and deceptive of reductionist abstractions.   That habit was embedded in the British line of thought that includes Darwin's inspiration, Malthus,  the British Utilitarian thinkers, the truly nasty Fabians and the legal system created to serve the class bound English establishment.  All of those ultimately served and operated under the assumptions of that class system, including those who peopled the universities and science faculties that developed those methods. Virtually everything, from the most pedestrian of assumptions up to the massive Poor Law- work house system was based in the economic evaluation of lives in the abstract but which in hard, living fact belonged to real people in the most flesh and blood and living and DEATH reality.   For some reason it is hard for English speakers to appreciate how blood drenched that method of thinking about people is, of those who speak English and those who don't.   It is somewhat easier to understand when it speaks German or some other language of some "other" or other.

One of the most horrifically banal and evil events I read about in my researches was the festive celebration held at the psychiatric hospital in Hadamar Germany when they had murdered and cremated their 10,000th person selected as being unfit and a burden to society.  Beer and cake were served as the thick, acrid smoke that had been that 10,000th person and, certainly those people who were represented in the immediately lower numbers of their records, went into the air above the hospital.  It, no doubt, added to the happiness of those members of the fit population who gassed the "patients" and fed the crematoria, those who were higher up in the ranks of fitness of the employees of the hospital, those who moved paper around.  No doubt the elite members of that select "fit", the nurses, the doctors and perhaps even the most elite administrators came down for a glass of beer and some cake.  Though it may have been the kind of act of indulgent condescension that comprises nobleness oblige.   That is an act of imagination on my part.   Perhaps something like that entered the minds of those who judged a number of those employees for various war crimes and crimes against humanity after the allied victory.   I can easily imagine that happening here and now and in English as well as I can in German in the 1940s.  I used to have a harder time imagining it happening here.  With the popularity of biological determinism in line with economic utility and efficiency since the 1970s, I can imagine it very easily, now.

* I would recommend listening to the story Rupert Sheldrake tells on that video I linked to the other day in which he tells of how, as a young, undergrad atheist member of the Humanist society and a honors student in biology, he went to listen to the eminent biologist, Julian Huxley lecture on the eugenic desirability of the right kind of people producing more children through artificial insemination.   His perfect candidate was an eminent figure in the sciences, with a good education, coming from a line of eminent and accomplished people, as Sheldrake said, Julian Huxley asserted that the most fit of such parents would be a Julian Huxley.   He goes on to note that Huxley's son, now in his extreme old age in California has had his level of happiness reduced by getting requests for DNA samples from people who suspect they were his half siblings, their birth resulting from sperm donation.

I'd not known that there was a more successful Nobel Stud Farm scam than the one that the dotty, racist and rather biologically naive Nobel laureate, physicist William Shockley set up.   I seem to recall that the only known donations to that American effort was the very aged sperm of one William Shockely, no doubt having the higher presence of mutations due to the age of the donor, and his assistant who he let in under the prospects of him being a "future Nobel".   One wonders, though blanches, at what those two must have imagined their stud line would produce.   I think the best Huxley of them all, Aldous, probably was closer to what would come of that kind of stuff.