While recently going through my old hard drive, in preparation for formatting it, I came across this passage from David Bentley Hart. Unfortunately, I didn't copy the URL of the article and I'm very pressed for time. I can say that his argument is like the one I made to atheist fan-boys of Sam Harris when I proposed instead of entertaining the idea of nuking "tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day" to forestall the use of what was so charmingly discussed as "the Islamic bomb" that, instead, we should give them an ultimatum of killing all of their nuclear physicists, the ones who had the capability to build nuclear weapons for them, no doubt a cost savings in lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions to one instead of that science fan-boy's final solution which would outdo "in a single day" Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc. in genocidal achievement.
As I've mentioned before, the same guys who were calmly contemplating nuclear genocide were horrified and shocked at the idea of KILLING SCIENTISTS! Clearly, they think the life of one, even "Islamic" bomb-making nuclear physicist is worth tens of millions of what even Harris noted were "innocent" lives. I don't remember if, considering the then frequently made brag that scientists were almost all atheists, I proposed that we call the nuclear arsenals of the West and the old Soviet Union, China, etc. "the atheist bomb" and contemplate taking out that population along with or instead of the one that Sam Harris put on his maybe(?)kill them list. If I didn't say it then I should have.
I think I liked finding a similar point made by Hart about that current most degenerate and disgusting of academic specialties, the "ethicists" whose main preoccupation would seem to be drawing up death lists, the overlap with those of Hitler being obvious and notable. I will remind you that such people currently hold faculty positions at many eminent universities and other institutions of repute and are always, Dershowitz-like, getting themselves on chat shows and giving popular lectures on who to kill.
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. . . Far more intellectually honest are those — like the late, almost comically vile Joseph Fletcher of Harvard — who openly acknowledge that any earnest attempt to improve the human stock must necessarily involve some measures of legal coercion. Fletcher, of course, was infamously unabashed in castigating modern medicine for “polluting” our gene pool with inferior specimens and in rhapsodizing upon the benefits the race would reap from instituting a regime of genetic invigilation that would allow society to eliminate “idiots” and “cripples” and other genetic defectives before they could burden us with their worthless lives. It was he who famously declared that reproduction is a privilege, not a right, and suggested that perhaps mothers should be forced by the state to abort “diseased” babies if they refused to do so of their own free will. Needless to say, state-imposed sterilization struck him as a reasonable policy; and he agreed with Linus Pauling that it might be wise to consider segregating genetic inferiors into a recognizable caste, marked out by indelible brands impressed upon their brows. And, striking a few minor transhumanist chords of his own, he even advocated — in a deranged and hideous passage from his book The Ethics of Genetic Control — the creation of “chimeras or parahumans...to do dangerous or demeaning jobs” of the sort that are now “shoved off on moronic or retarded individuals” — which, apparently, was how he viewed janitors, construction workers, firefighters, miners, and persons of that ilk.*
Of course, there was always a certain oafish audacity in Fletcher’s degenerate driveling about “morons” and “defectives,” given that there is good cause to suspect, from a purely utilitarian vantage, that academic ethicists — especially those like Fletcher, who are notoriously mediocre thinkers, possessed of small culture, no discernible speculative gifts, no records of substantive philosophical achievement, and execrable prose styles — constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world? And should those men be permitted, in their turn, to sire offspring? I ask this question entirely in earnest, because I think it helps to identify the one indubitable truth about all social movements towards eugenics: namely, that the values that will determine which lives are worth living, and which not, will always be the province of persons of vicious temperament. If I were asked to decide what qualities to suppress or encourage in the human species, I might first attempt to discover if there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to moral idiocy and then, if there is, to eliminate it; then there would be no more Joseph Fletchers (or Peter Singers, or Linus Paulings, or James Rachels), and I might think all is well. But, of course, the very idea is a contradiction in terms. Decisions regarding who should or should not live can, by definition, be made only by those who believe such decisions should be made; and therein lies the horror that nothing can ever exorcise from the ideology behind human bioengineering.
I will point out that if we killed all of the nuclear physicists who are capable of producing nuclear weapons, we could rid the world of the danger of nuclear annihilation. I think that would be a boon to the world whereas I can see no similar good in ridding the world of people with Down's syndrome.
* I have read some of Fletcher, I think Hart's accusation of his elitism isn't much of an exaggeration. I will note that he started out as an Episcopalian priest but became an atheist.
I will further note, in line with my recent posts, that that moral degenerate was one of those the ever fame-fucking Humanists gave their Humanist of the Year award to. They love eugenicists and those who propose genocide, such is their "humanism".
Note: We are due to have two days of storms and it is likely that we will lose electricity on my road. If I'm down, you'll know the reason.
Update: Looking for edits to be made, it occurs to me that Fletcher, Pauling and Singer all were given the Humanist Of The Year award, I'm not sure about Rachels, he may have not been famous enough for them. They love 'em famous, too.
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