You wonder why the the phenomenon and history of eugenics is so interesting to me. Considering the amount of time I've spent on it, it's a fair question. One which has several answers of different gravity.
Most importantly, eugenics was and is one of the more blatant and blatantly hypocritical instances of those with more power violating the most basic rights of people with less power, everything from passively denying them access to goods and services including educational opportunities, to coerced and even forced sterilizations and all the way up to murdering them.
The Nazi eugenics program is not separable from the mass murders of the T4 program and the gassing of those deemed to be unfit in death camps. They were the creation of the same groups of scientists, engineers and politicians working out of the same basic assumptions, all of them informed by same primitive scientific and concepts of natural selection and genetic fitness. The evil results in human life that are the real history and existence of eugenics makes it an important thing to understand. Unless the real nature of the concepts that scientists based it on and their motives are understood we are in serious danger of that history being repeated. The basic ideas of eugenics are still current in world cultures, taught as science, accepted as facts of nature. The eagerness with which even the most scientifically illiterate news readers and columnists cling to neo-eugenics, for example, evolutionary psychology, betrays a total lack of understanding of the issues involved mixed with a dangerous faith in even the most clearly illogical ideas that they are allowed to be passed off as science. More about that, later.
That other scientific and economic ideas were part of that is also true. The pedigree of the most potent of those through the hardly natural, entirely intentional and artificial British class system, in forms such as Malthusian economics bring related points of interest up.
Included in those is the ease and willingness of people with the most obvious interests in class privilege, such as the Darwin inner circle and those who adopted their ideas, to mistake artificial social conditions as universal aspects of nature. The reductionism involved in asserting that the privileges they enjoy, a result of entirely artificial conditions brought about by aristocrats exerting political and military control over people on the basis of force in the ancient past, are in any way similar to the lives of plants and animals in the wild has an enormous amount to tell us about how even science is not a vaccination against the most obvious and corruptly motivated wishful thinking.
The speed with which eugenics was derived from natural selection is instructive as to how ideas favorable to an elite can be thought up and the corners which any asserted science will be allowed to cut if it favors those with power. That those with such interests were the ones who decided questions of what was allowed as science then and, to a large extent, now, is certainly important to understand.
On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, within the next five years Francis Galton had conceived of using it as a scientific validation of the superior life status of the class of men he and Charles Darwin belonged to. Of course, Galton never put it in those terms, but I am not going to pretend that his hypothesis and his methods could ever have been expected to produce any other result than the one he got. I will also not pretend that he was likely to publicize any results he got that undermined the superiority of the class his study favored. An invalidation of the superiority of the wealthy and powerful would have died, immediately and never would have developed into any alleged science. His good news for the rich, those who had university degrees and entree into high status professions found the most fertile of ground, the most favorable of environments for it to flourish and propagate in the very class with the power to call it "science" and to fund it.
In order to come up with what would be acceptable in the rather loose definition of evidence that would prove acceptable for his study, Galton used the hardly random group of largely incestuously selected, aristocratic men who were graduates of Cambridge University in what was clearly not a valid representation of the entire human population. Everything about his study invalidated it as a means of finding alleged universal laws covering the human population, everything about it was obviously rigged to favor an artificial and self-selecting group of men who, among other things, were only too willing to associate themselves with any of the very varied accomplishments and varied virtues of their class mates, perhaps especially those Cambridge men who had never done anything noteworthy. And in the way of self-confirming bias that is rampant in the history of such science, those results were decisively determinative in how future thought in the matter was to be found acceptable as science. That is something I strongly suspect was as true for natural selection as it became viewed as the sufficient explanation of the enormously varied, enormously long and vastly numbered organisms, known in only a tiny fraction of relevant examples available to scientists for study in the question of evolution. I didn't start this study as a skeptic of natural selection, the longer it goes on the more skeptical I am that it is anything more than a conventional and required POV.
Galton published his first articles which he, himself, would later classify as eugenics in 1865, represented as already being scientifically significant. In fact, Charles Darwin, eight years later, cited them as such in The Descent of Man. Galton published the first major book on the topic in 1869, Hereditary Genius, also cited by Darwin as settled science, three years later. Eugenics took off with an amazing speed, considering the hardly settled question of the status of natural selection. In fact, I strongly suspect that the good news for rich men which was eugenics, the validation of the disdain which the rich had for the poor, especially but hardly exclusively in Britain, and the validation of their being crushed into the misery that the New Poor Law had instituted, was an important factor in the adoption of natural selection as a "law of nature". It was not universally accepted among scientists until well into the next century even as its offspring, eugenics, was given enormous legal power to oppress people on the basis of race and class. Even in those countries reputed to be class-free democracies, especially the United States, even in states which very likely had far less support for the theory of evolution than they did for eugenics.
Ironically and surprisingly, the intense British campaign for eugenics, peopled by the elites of everything from the far right to the pseudo-left, was unsuccessful in passing laws due to a combination of Catholic and Labour Party opposition to it. A number of American states, even those which may well have had majorities opposed to Darwinism, nevertheless made eugenics law and programs which the Nazis would study and use in their justification of theirs. The status of eugenics was strongly related to the strength of the Catholic opposition and its influence. The first American eugenics law, that of the hardly progressive state of Indiana, was adopted in 1907, twenty-four years after Galton invented the word "eugenics".
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Beyond question, the most important reasons to study the history of eugenics is as the scientific motivation it was for mass murder and other violations of human rights on a large scale. Considering what the eugenicists overcame to do that, in conventional morality and religion, only something with the power provided by the status of science could have done it that quickly. The importance and relevance of that is that, despite popular belief, the promotion of eugenics by scientists, academics, journalists and others, didn't disappear with the defeat of the Nazis and the revelation of the extent of their crimes on the basis of applied natural selection.
If you looked closely at the photocopy of the letter posted yesterday in which Charles Davenport announed to Francis Galton the establishment of the Eugenics Records Office, you may have been surprised to see that it was on a letterhead from the American Breeders Association, the group which supported the establishment of organized promotion of eugenics laws in the United States. If that doesn't make you feel queasy it is probably due to not fully thinking out what happens in a breeding operation. One of the things which made the artificial selection of livestock breeding so useful to Charles Darwin in promoting the theory of natural selection is that as well as breeders selecting those animals they choose to breed on the basis of "traits" they favor, animals not kept for breeding stock are slaughtered for food or other uses or, in some cases, merely so they won't have to feed, house and otherwise care for them. Animals not selected for breeding aren't kept as pets. Growing up among farmers, I didn't realize that large numbers of even college educated people don't realize that until I wrote my first blog posts on these topics. Death was always the major force in the concept of natural selection, the "selection" of nature was a selection of which organisms didn't leave offspring mostly because they died. I am struck at how easily those whose daily business consisted of the raising and killing of animals as commercial material looked at human beings in a similar way.
The inhibiting force of traditional morality, in its politically effective form as Christianity in most of the west, was all that ever stood between the assumptions included in eugenics and murder. But, those inhibitions removed by the enlightening power of science and the desire to be modern and up to date, it's rather amazing how freely it was seriously considered as social policy in the Unites States and elsewhere, among, no doubt, affluent and well off members of select committees.
Here are two passages from The War Against the Weak by Edwin Black.
- In 1911, the leading pioneer eugenicists, supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the American Breeders Association and the Carnegie Institution, met to propound a battle plan to create a master race of white, blond, blue-eyed Americans devoid of undesirables.
Point eight of the Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population specified euthanasia as a possibility to be considered. Of course, euthanasia was merely a euphemism—actually a misnomer. Eugenicists did not see euthanasia as a “merciful killing” of those in pain, but rather a “painless killing” of people deemed unworthy of life. The method most whispered about, and publicly denied, but never out of mind, was a “lethal chamber.”
The lethal chamber first emerged in Britain during the Victorian era as a humane means of killing stray dogs and cats. Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson patented a “Lethal Chamber for the Painless Extinction of Lower Animal Life” in the 1880s. Richardson’s original blueprints showed a large wood- and glass-paneled chamber big enough for a Saint Bernard or several smaller dogs, serviced by a tall slender tank for carbonic acid gas, and a heating apparatus. In 1884 the Battersea Dogs Home in London became one of the first institutions to install the device, and used it continuously with “perfect success” according to a sales proposal at the time. By the turn of the century other charitable animal institutions in England and other European countries were also using the chamber.
This solution for unwanted pets was almost immediately contemplated as a solution for unwanted humans—criminals, the feebleminded and other misfits. The concept of “the lethal chamber” was in common vernacular by the turn of the century. When mentioned, it needed no explanation; everyone understood what it meant.
In 1895, the British novelist Robert Chambers penned his vision of a horrifying world twenty-five years into the future. He wrote of a New York where the elevated trains were dismantled and “the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.” No explanation of “Government Lethal Chamber” was offered—or necessary. Indeed, the idea of gassing the unwanted became a topic of contemporary chitchat. In 1901, the British author Arnold White, writing in Efficiency and Empire, chastised “flippant people of lazy mind [who] talk lightly of the ‘lethal chamber’…”
- Leaders of the American eugenic establishment also debated lethal chambers and other means of euthanasia. But in America, while the debate began as an argument about death with dignity for the terminally ill or those in excruciating pain, it soon became a palatable eugenic solution. In 1900, the physician W. Duncan McKim published Heredity and Human Progress, asserting, “Heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness… The surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of this high privilege [reproduction], is a gentle, painless death.” He added, “In carbonic acid gas, we have an agent which would instantaneously fulfill the need.”
By 1903, a committee of the National Conference on Charities and Correction conceded that it was as yet undecided whether “science may conquer sentiment” and ultimately elect to systematically kill the unfit. In 1904, the superintendent of New Jersey’s Vineland Training School, E. R. Johnstone, raised the issue during his presidential address to the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feebleminded Persons. “Many plans for the elimination [of the feebleminded] have been proposed,” he said, referred to numerous recently published suggestions of a “painless death.” That same year, the notion of executing habitual criminals and the incurably insane was offered to the National Prison Association.
Some U.S. lawmakers considered similar ideas. Two years later in 1906, the Ohio legislature considered a bill empowering physicians to chloroform permanently diseased and mentally incapacitated persons. In reporting this, Rentoul told his British colleagues that it was Ohio’s attempt to “murder certain persons suffering from incurable disease.” Iowa considered a similar measure.
By 1910, the idea of sending the unfit into lethal chambers was regularly bandied about in American sociological and eugenic circles, causing a debate no less strident than the one in England. In 1911, E. B. Sherlock’s book, The Feebleminded: a guide to study and practice, acknowledged that “glib suggestions of the erection of lethal chambers are common enough.…” Like others, he rejected execution in favor of eugenic termination of bloodlines. “Apart from the difficulty that the provision of lethal chambers is impracticable in the existing state law…,” he continued, “the removal of them [the feebleminded] would do practically nothing toward solving the chief problem with the mentally defective set…, the persistence of the obnoxious stock.”
One of the figures in history who as recently as 2005 I could read with pleasure but whose every witticism revolts me now is the Fabian socialist, hero of so-called liberals and brilliant dramatist, George Bernard Shaw. His remark made to the elite members of the Eugenics Education Society in 1910, the same year as Davenport's letter to Galton announcing the creation of the Eugenics Records Office, are not unique among the stars of eugenics and the smart set in Britain and elsewhere. Imagine one of his more developed characters, perhaps Henry Higgins saying it.
A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence, simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.
I have to wonder if Galton was present, he well may have been he was the head of the organization until Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, became head of it. Both of them must have heard about it. In a book written in the next decade, Leonard Darwin discussed the possible use of "lethal chambers" for eugenics. I'd love to have an attendance list of those who did hear it and if any of the objected to it. For me, his remark about the necessity of mass murder in lethal chambers, proposed as eugenically sound, acted as a key to look more fundamentally at his thinking and his writing and once you have seen it in light of a mind that could say what he did reveals that, despite its reputation as some kind of progressive or liberal thing, is merely the typical British thinking fully informed by the assumptions of the class system, not far different from that which informed Galton and Darwin and Malthus.
And, remember, he was one of the lights of the Fabian society, a group whose goals included harrying the most destitute out of existence and enforcing the absolute destitution of the poor before they received any and very meager aid, what the brightest of the British Brights of his time produced as a political left. We still get those kinds of people on the left even outside of Britain. Just as an example, Peter Singer is famous for his utilitarian proposals for killing people and he's hardly been rejected as an "ethicist" over it in any place among the English speaking peoples. It is remarkable to me how among the materialists, even those allegedly of the left, the contemplation of murder as a means of virtue recurs as a continuing feature of their discourse.
None of this stuff is the dead past, it's all relevant to today, it will be as long as natural selection retains its status as both science and ideology. I'm convinced that its status as science is driven primarily by ideology. I think with such fantastic assertions about it, even its extension outside of biology, by such popular voices as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, etc. its role as a atheist-fundamentalist god substitute* is even stronger today than it was at the turn of the last century. And, as the history shows, that assertion of natural selection as THE primary fact of biology will always lead, immediately to ideas for applying it to the human population. It did in the early 1860s, it still does today,
* Read the eminent geneticist H. Allen Orr's review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
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