Eugenics
Primer
Eugenics
was a pseudoscience given birth by Francis Galton
in the mid 1800s (that's him up there). It taught
that the human race could be improved by selective
breeding and proper living. It took natural selection
and religion and class consciousness and bigotry
and made sort of a wacky pop-science pie out of
them.
In
the US, it swelled from the epicenter of Cold Spring
Harbor - a genetics lab that is still in operation
today and probably wishes Eugenics never happened.
Among Eugenics' greatest hits were:
So
Eugenics came along and disguised itself as a science.
It used the methodologies and terminologies of anthropology,
sociology, biology, criminology, psychology, medicine,
chemistry, etc. to "prove" its assertions. And,
to quote Frank Zappa, "The while people really like[d]
it." Teddy Roosevelt liked it. The King of England
liked it. Oliver Wendall Holmes liked it. It was
hip. It was trendy.
So
much so that there were these bizarre eugenics contests
at state fairs where families would square off to
prove who had the best pedigree. If I had a time
machine, that would be a first stop for me.
So
it was tremendously goofy and obviously methodologically
flawed from the very beginning. But it was so reassuring
to scared bigots - anxious to prove superiority
in a way that allowed them to clense themselves
with pity on the oppressed rather than scorn. Liberals
did it. Conservatives did it. Communists did it.
Capitalists did it. In general, those who didn't
do it had it done to them.
So
it bopped along, with the supreme court's blessing.
Sterilizing people, incarcerating people and generally
being a huge void in the world's ethics. All the
way up until the mid 1930s when Hitler really got
busy. By this time Mein Kampf was already 10 years
old - but no one paid much attention. Until people
noticed that Hitler's foundation was Eugenics.
Then
we had World War II.
Then
everyone forgot about Eugenics. But not until it
had totally changed the world. In fact, they forgot
about it to the point of denial. Until the 1970s,
the state of Virginia regularly and routinely practiced
sterilization of some types of "mental defectives".
Even after this some people were unwillingly put
through the treatment.
So,
it is a very big part of world history. It had some
positive impacts - better schools and institutions
for the mentally challeneged, genetic and dna research,
etc. But mostly its impacts were negative and ugly.
Perhaps, to me, the most important thing about it
is that it is our number one lesson to watch out
for science with an agenda or science with questionable
ethics.
