Babies by Design

Disclaimer for the casual web surfer who stumbles across this: "This is a post AGAINST the concept or practice of eugenics."

Eugenics is the science of attempting to improve a human population by controlled breeding.

Eugenics seeks to mate persons with superior physical attributes so that each generation is physically and mentally superior to the previous generation. Conversely, people with "undesirable" physical traits, or disabilities, or mental deficiencies, or likelihood of birth defects, or undesirable social traits (criminals, etc.,) are discouraged (or prevented by government authority) from reproducing. [An example of governmental prohibition today would be no close family members mating; in some states, you can't marry your first cousin for example. So, most of us support SOME forms of eugenics.]

But much of this is science fiction stuff that has been around at least as long as science fiction has been written.

The questions that come to this blog author's mind are mostly questions such as, "Who decides?" What is desirable? What is superior? Would there come a time when the "superior" beings would be substandard by comparison and no longer be allowed to reproduce, due to being replaced by supermen and women? What becomes of the culls? I'm guessing Stephen Hawking couldn't be allowed to reproduce if the old eugenics folks were in control. They did seem to make some exceptions though, for rich folks with disabilities.

The attempt to improve DNA with the mating of two superior subjects is called positive eugenics, and the goal of removing substandard DNA from a given society is called negative eugenics. In other words, on the one hand you do what Hitler proposed and breed only superior stock to create a Master Race, and on the other hand, you don't allow the feeble-minded, alcoholics, diseased, (or blacks or Jews or _________) to reproduce. You sterilize them or kill them outright. "Superior stock" doesn't have to be big, strong healthy people necessarily; they can be college professors and people whose families have great longevity and don't have a history of disease (as long as they also have white skin, of course.) I hope I am not starting to sound cynical in this piece.

While this series of posts will talk mostly about the eugenics movements in the U.S. and Canada in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics has been around longer than that.  No, you can go really far back in history and find many instances of trying to "improve" the human race by selective breeding. In ancient Greece, for example, the Spartans were amazing warriors, according to the writings that have come down. Surely selective breeding was one of those tools used to achieve this, and not simple calisthenics or cold showers and morning runs. The name "eugenics" was supposedly coined by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Neither was a proponent of it, only interested in the theory of natural selection.

In the Bible you read of God commanding the Hebrews to avoid intermarrying with the local peoples they lived with. There are probably other eugenics stories in the Bible that don't come to my mind right now as well. But the point is, throughout history, attempts have been made to "improve" or "preserve" parts of the human race.

It is interesting to note that in the "recent" eugenics movement, they were not only concerned with physically strong and healthy specimens, but they also practiced negative eugenics by sterilizing every sort of defenseless class of people you can imagine, in the theory that so doing would stop the continuing of feeblemindedness being passed down from generation to generation (which it probably would) to believing it would cure things like alcoholism and criminal activity. Indeed, one of the popular proponents of this commented that if you want to change the undesirable characteristics of a boy, you have to start with his grandfather. I guess he meant there is no real hope of improvement using only environmental means. But that seemed to be the mindset.

Some people whose names were associated with eugenics early on, in some way or another, include Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling, and more.

I won't go on and on forever on this subject, but I want to do at least two more posts, one on Kellogg and the Seventh Day Adventists, and a more serious one on the treatment of mentally ill patients in government hospitals.  I have already covered the Nazi Germany eugenics in earlier posts.

Bred for Quality

Over the years we have bred animals for their best qualities. We breed cows to give the most or best milk and meat, dogs to look funny at dog shows, horses to win races and pull heavy things. We don't give it a second thought. We don't breed the runts of the litters; we discard them. We breed  for desired characteristics. Just like Mother Nature does in the wild. Survival of the fittest, death to the weak and infirm. Same with plants. Some people still get patents for new roses and orchids. And our food? Practically all corn is "hybrid" nowadays. I suppose seeds in general. Bred for beauty or production or resistance to disease.

Humans? Not so much anymore. We still practice eugenics through abortion, of course, including the desired sex of the child. We abort those we know will be deformed, prone to diseases, feeble mindedness. Abortion is so much more than poor teenaged girls not having to have back alley abortions, isn't it? Abortion has become everything the silly moralists of the 1950s and 1960s warned it would become. Or soon will be.

Abortion is used for ethnic cleansing in our society as well, just like eugenics was used in the 1930s, only much more so. MANY more black children are aborted each year, proportionately, than any other flavor. Mostly by white doctors. Not ethnic cleansing, you say? Not eugenics? Ok.

And yet we are appalled when we read about what happened in the 1920s - 1960s. The alcoholics and feeble-minded and retarded (words of that era) not allowed to have babies, sterilize by court order or sometimes only by the order of the warden of an "asylum" somewhere. It is a sad story, even though I try not to judge people from times other than my own.

I want to tell some of those stories in the coming posts. Do you know any?

Progressives and Eugenics

"Progressives" in this post refers to the American political party of the early 20th century, and their vision for America (and eventually the world.) They had many fascinating things in their political platform, their beliefs and goals. Some were worthy, some were idealistic, and some were downright crazy by today's standards.

A belief that the human species should be improved upon by means of governmentally-enforced "natural selection" methods - as Charles Darwin had written about regarding animals and plants - was one of those rather far-out visions of the early Progressive Party. Although the Party faded before long, the eugenics studies - and experiments - continued on into the early 1960s.

Again, the early Progressive Party is not the same as the ideals and goals of the current "progressive" branch of the Liberal Democrat political party in America today. At least not the eugenics part, I don't think. On the other hand, the current bunch of crazies living on HuffPost would probably think it would be ok to lobotomize Sarah Palin in order to silence her.

I want to talk about eugenics rather than politics in the next few posts, however.

This subject is too large to do in one post. Some of the topics I want to cover include Kellogg's of Battle Creek, Seventh Day Adventists, mental health facilities in the U.S., some theorists, famous locked-up people, some people associated with the progressive/eugenics movement, Nazi Germany, and more. I HOPE YOU WILL COMMENT RIGHT AWAY IF ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SUBJECT INSPIRES YOU TO DO SO, RATHER THAN WAIT UNTIL I FINISH THE WHOLE THING, AND WITHOUT WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER I INTEND TO TALK ABOUT YOUR COMMENT SUBJECT LATER.

Racial hygiene

Integral to the Theory of Evolution is the concept of Natural Selection. Survival of the fittest. We can see this taking place in nature all around us and no one disputes the phenomenon; "survival of the fittest" is fact, not theory.

While "survival of the fittest" implies species improvement in the hit and miss natural state, "selective breeding" arrives at the same end much faster and by design. Selective breeding produces purebred dogs, cattle, race horses. It has been going on for a very long time and is a well-accepted practice.

But what about "pedigree" in humans?

Eugenics is the study and practice of selective breeding applied to humans. The aim is the same: improvement of the species. This usually really means "improving human genetic qualities." Advocates of eugenics seek to purify the human gene pool. Like thoroughbred horses, only humans.

Can this be a way to eradicate disease? Increase average IQ? Create a race of super humans?

Of course, just as in dog breeding, one would have to cull the litter. Not only would you have to choose the best male and females to mate, you would have to destroy the weak and sickly and defective, so they couldn't breed and contaminate the super race.

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Germany following World War One was ripe for a Hitler, I have postulated, because of a need for both a savior and a scapegoat to achieve some sort of national redemption. Hitler was the savior; the Jews were the scapegoat. It goes deeper than that, though. If you read about the Thule Society, as suggested in an earlier post, then you know a little bit of background on the Aryan or Indo-Aryan race theories that seemed to be held by Hitler and his cronies.

During the 1920s and 1930s, a huge number of "dispossessed" run-of-the-mill Germans seemed to have bought into this "super race" theory as well. If you are a doormat, perhaps you dream of being something more worthy and special again; perhaps you become disposed to listen to people who promise to lead you back to self-respect, even greatness. People like Hitler and Goebbels. Perhaps you join the Nazi party. Perhaps you don't, but you believe anyway.

The Jews were only the beginning. There was a long list of "mongrels" and weaklings that would need to be purged if the Aryan race was to rise to its proper place in the scheme of human Natural Selection.

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"Life unworthy of life"

Between 1939 and 1945, the German SS systematically killed between 11 and 14 million people.

The murder of 6 million Jews is well-known, but the list was much longer than Jews. Non-Jewish Poles, Communists, political opponents, members of resistance groups, homosexuals, Roma ("Gypsies"), the physically handicapped, the mentally deficient, Soviet prisoners of war (perhaps as many as 3 million), Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists, trade unionists, psychiatric patients. And this doesn't even count the people who died simply of slave labor, starvation and disease in concentrations camps, and as a result of medical experimentation.

The first to go were the children with physical or developmental disabilities.

Then there were the medical experiments.

I sincerely hope your mind and sensibilities are such that you cannot begin to imagine the extent of these ghoulish horrors. Descriptions and even photos are available on the web. Do yourself a favor and don't look them up. I almost puked.

Quite simply, the Nazi doctors tortured Jewish and Gypsy children, and many others. Operations without anesthetics, "patients" put in pressure chambers, drug testing, castrations, frozen to death and exposed to countless traumas. The "Angel of Death", Josef Mengele, had his own infamous experiments on twins. Afterwards they were usually murdered and dissected.

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After the war, many of Hitler's henchmen were tested and found to be quite psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing in their communities. They were husbands who kissed their wives. They were fathers who tucked their children into bed.

Then they went out and tortured little children, brutalized women, gassed millions, performed hideous experiments.

The word "villain" falls short here, if we are looking for sources of literary character development.

No, here we get into the realm of unspeakable monsters; things you are afraid to look at in the dark; real-life Bogeymen.