Eugenics

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Francis Galton, the Victorian era's quintessential polymath such as early advocate of eugenics; a term he helped coin
We civilised men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands... Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. ~ Charles Darwin
[Campaign Poster:] "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too."
The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. ~ Nietzsche
Any new set of conditions which renders a species' food and safety very easily obtained, seems to lead to degeneration. ~ Ray Lankester
Selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature. ~ Edward Thorndike

Eugenics (From eǘs meaning “good” and gígnomai meaning “breeding”, together: “well-bred” or “good in stock") is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.

Quotes

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  • We civilised men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands... Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
    • Charles Darwin, 1871, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: MacMillan, p. 501
  • Nobody wants to be caught agreeing with that monster, even in a single particular. The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from "ought" to "is" and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice.
    I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?
  • We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason – to separate the sound from the worthless.
  • In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play and the fittest did not survive... It is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.
  • One of the effects of civilisation is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.
    • Francis Galton, 1865. Hereditary talent and character. MacMillan's Magazine, 12, 157-166; 318-327.
  • There is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilisation.
  • To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies. Institutions which 'foster good-for-nothings' commit an unquestionable injury because they put a stop to that natural process of elimination by which society continually purifies itself.
  • If a man has no sons, he has no full right to speak about the needs of a single matter of state. He has to have risked with the others what is most precious to him; only then is he bound firmly to the state. One must consider the happiness of one's descendants, and so, above all, have descendants, in order to take a proper, natural part in all institutions and their transformation. The development of higher morality depends on a man's having sons: this makes him unselfish, or, more exactly, it expands his selfishness over time, and allows him seriously to pursue goals beyond his individual lifetime.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (M. Faber, trans.), University of Nebraska Press Lincoln, (1996), §455
  • One can justly be proud of an unbroken line of good ancestors, up to one's father-but not proud of the line, for everyone has that. The descent from good ancestors makes up true nobility of birth; one single interruption in that chain, one evil ancestor, and the nobility of birth is cancelled out. Everyone who speaks of his nobility should be asked whether he has no violent, greedy, dissolute, malicious, or cruel man among his ancestors. If he can thereupon answer "no" in good conscience, one should court his friendship.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (M. Faber, trans.), University of Nebraska Press Lincoln, (1996), §456
  • We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (M. Faber, trans.), University of Nebraska Press Lincoln, (1996), §520
  • The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.
  • Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.
  • Die dummen Moralisten haben immer die Veredelung angestrebt ohne zugleich die Basis zu wollen: die leibliche Veradlichung [...][,] sie haben an’s Individuum gedacht und nicht an die Fortdauer des Edlen durch Zeugung. Kurzsichtig!
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, eKGWB/NF-1884,26[281]
    • Translation: Those stupid moralists have always strived for ennoblement without at the same time desiring its foundation: the embodied nobility [...][,] they thought of the individual and not of the perpetuation of this nobility through reproduction. Short-sighted!
  • The keystone of the new social structure, the pivotal factor of advancing civilization, the guide of the new religion, is biology; for man is an animal, and his characteristics, his requirements, and his reactions can be recorded and studied quite as carefully and precisely as those of any other animal.
  • 60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.
    • [A] New People (the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the Nazi Party) (1938).
  • The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves… If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate.
    • Eugen Bleuler (1924). Textbook of Psychiatry [Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie]. trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Macmillan. p.214.
  • The eugenics movement resists cramming into a single, unambiguous political box. ...When the Supreme Court, in the greatest victory [Buck v. Bell,] of the American eugenics movement, upheld compulsory sterilization of the mentally unfit in 1927, all liberal justices voted aye; the single dissent in this eight-to-one ruling was filed by [Pierce Butler,] the court's most conservative member, a catholic who upheld his church's position on reproductive controls.
    • Stephen Jay Gould, "Does the Stoneless Plum Instruct the Thinking Reed," in Dinosaur in a Haystack (1955)
  • Eugenics is dead.
    • Daniel Kevles, 1985. In the Name of Eugenics. New York: A. A. Knopf.
  • If you don't include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society... So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That's a problem.
    • Lee Kuan Yew, National Day Rally (1983). Cited in The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future, Fred Pearce
  • Birth control and abortion are turning out to be great eugenic advances of our time. If they had been advanced for eugenic reasons, it would have retarded or stopped their acceptance.
  • [T]here is a fundamental difference between a regulatory system where eugenics [under whatever name] is practised for the well-being of the individual - whether human or non-human - and an authoritarian society where eugenics is practised for the notional benefit of a class, race or nation.
  • While modern social conditions are removing the crude physical checks which the unrestrained struggle for existence places on the over-fertility of the unfit, they may at the same time be leading to a lessened relative fertility in those physically and mentally fitter stocks, from which the bulk of our leaders have hitherto been drawn.
    • Karl Pearson, 1901. National Life from the Standpoint of Science. London, Methuen.
  • The only remedy, if one be possible at all, is to alter the relative fertility of the good and the bad stocks in the community.
    • Karl Pearson, 1903. On the inheritance of the mental and moral characters in man. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 33, 179-237.
  • [T]he campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics.
  • But I see a third motive which unconsciously plays an important part; it is the idea of sacrifice. A lunatic may cause the mental and economic decay of a family and also ruin it morally. If healthy human beings make great sacrifices for the community and lay down their lives by order of the state, the insane person, if he could arouse himself mentally and make a decision, would choose a similar sacrifice for himself. Why should not the state be allowed to enact this sacrifice in his case and impose on him what he would want to do himself?"
    • Dr. Robert Servatius, attorney for Nazi war criminal Karl Brandt at Nuremberg, summing up the argument presented to the court in defense of the Nazi euthanasia program and Dr. Brandt's role therein: Nazi rationale for euthanizing the "unfit." "Final Plea for Defendant Karl Brandt, by Dr. Servatius," July 14, 1947, "The Medical Case" in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law, (1949), No. 10, vol. II, October 1946 - April 1949, Nuenberg, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., p. 136. [7] This 15-volume series, also known as “The Green Series,” focuses on the 12 trials of almost 200 defendants [8] [9] (Scholars have noted similarities between the language of Buck v. Bell and that of Dr. Robert Servatius, defense attorney for Dr. Karl Brandt at Nuremberg: "Brandt's attorney introduced documents quoting extensively from the eugenics literature. He cited Harry Laughlin's 1914 proposal calling for the sterilization of fifteen million Americans and also quoted a translation of the Buck v. Bell opinion from a German text on eugenics. Brandt's defense of Nazi experiments resulting in the death of concentration camp prisoners seemed to echo the Holmes opinion. Other Nuremberg defendants also cited Buck, and a translation of the Holmes opinion appeared again as a defense example in the exhibit 'Race Protection Laws of other Countries'." Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck V. Bell, 2008, Paul A. Lombardo, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801898242 ISBN 9780801898242 p. 239. [10]) See also: War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black, Dialog Press; 2003, expanded edition, 2012, ISBN 0914153293 ISBN 9780914153290 [11][12]
  • It appears after analyzing the Fabians rationale, that the ideological links of eugenic with democratic socialism is stronger than with Nazism, fascism and communism.
    • Alberto Spektorowski and Liza Ireni-Saban, Politics of Eugenics: Productionism, Population, and National Welfare (Extremism and Democracy), Routledge (2013) p. 46.
  • We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
  • Selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.
    • Edward Thorndike, (1913). Education Psychology: briefer course. p.13; as quoted by Richard Lynn, (2001). Eugenics: A Reassessment. Praeger.
  • In the same way as the state demands the death of its best men as soldiers, it is entitled to order the death of the condemned in its battle against epidemics and diseases. No antique sacrifices to gods and demons are demanded any longer, only a well considered expiation as a help for the community and indeed exclusively in its interest.
  • [N]o man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given.
    • H. G. Wells, The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for?, (1940)
      • However, it is notable that in other places, a scientific twist was added by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895) in which Wells prophesied the splitting of the human race into variously degenerate forms, and again in his The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) wherein forcibly mutated animal-human hybrids keep reverting to their earlier forms.
  • Any new set of conditions which renders a species' food and safety very easily obtained, seems to lead to degeneration.
    • Ray Lankester (1880), Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism
  • I was born human, but it was an accident of fate. … Humanity can change itself but hopefully it will be an individual choice. Those who want to stay human can and those who want to evolve into something much more powerful with greater capabilities can. There is no way I want to stay a mere human.

See also

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Social and political philosophy
Ideologies Anarchism ⦿ Aristocratic Radicalism (Nietzsche • Brandes...) ⦿ Autarchism ⦿ Ba'athism (• Aflaq • al-Assad • Hussein) ⦿ Communism ⦿ (Neo-)Confucianism ⦿ Conservatism ⦿ Constitutionalism ⦿ Dark Enlightenment ⦿ Environmentalism ⦿ Fascism (• Islamo- • Eco- • Francoism...) vs. Nazism ⦿ Feminism (• Anarcha- • Radical • Gender-critical • Second-wave...) ⦿ Formalism/(Neo-)cameralism ⦿ Freudo-Marxism ⦿ Gaddafism/Third International Theory ⦿ Legalism ⦿ Leninism/Vanguardism ⦿ Juche (• Kim Il-sung • Kim Jong Il • Kim Jong Un...) ⦿ Liberalism ⦿ Libertarianism/Laissez-faire Capitalism ⦿ Maoism ⦿ Marxism ⦿ Mohism ⦿ Republicanism ⦿ Social democracy ⦿ Socialism ⦿ Stalinism ⦿ Straussianism ⦿ Syndicalism ⦿ Xi Jinping thought ⦿ New Monasticism (• MacIntyre • Dreher...)
Modalities Absolutism vs. Social constructionism/Relativism ⦿ Autarky/Autonomy vs. Heteronomy ⦿ Authoritarianism/Totalitarianism ⦿ Colonialism vs. Imperialism ⦿ Communitarianism vs. Liberalism ⦿ Elitism vs. Populism/Majoritarianism/Egalitarianism ⦿ Individualism vs. Collectivism ⦿ Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism ⦿ Particularism vs. Universalism ⦿ Modernism/Progressivism vs. Postmodernism ⦿ Reactionism/Traditionalism vs. Futurism/Transhumanism
Concepts Alienation ⦿ Anarcho-tyranny ⦿ Anomie ⦿ Authority ⦿ Conquest's Laws of Politics ⦿ Duty ⦿ Eugenics ⦿ Elite ⦿ Elite theory ⦿ Emancipation ⦿ Equality ⦿ Freedom ⦿ Government ⦿ Hegemony ⦿ Hierarchy ⦿ Iron law of oligarchy ⦿ Justice ⦿ Law ⦿ Monopoly ⦿ Natural law ⦿ Noblesse oblige ⦿ Norms ⦿ Obedience ⦿ Peace ⦿ Pluralism ⦿ Polyarchy ⦿ Power ⦿ Propaganda ⦿ Property ⦿ Revolt ⦿ Rebellion ⦿ Revolution ⦿ Rights ⦿ Ruling class ⦿ Social contract ⦿ Social inequality ⦿ Society ⦿ State ⦿ Tocqueville effect ⦿ Totalitarian democracy ⦿ War ⦿ Utopia
Government Aristocracy ⦿ Autocracy ⦿ Bureaucracy ⦿ Dictatorship ⦿ Democracy ⦿ Meritocracy ⦿ Monarchy ⦿ Ochlocracy ⦿ Oligarchy ⦿ Plutocracy ⦿ Technocracy ⦿ Theocracy ⦿ Tyranny
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