Eugenics, Past and Future
23rd June 2012
Ross Douthat looks at the closet master-racers of the Crust.
But these same eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social reform, partisans of science, critics of stasis and reaction. “They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers,” Conniff writes of Fisher and his peers, “but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors and family men.” From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about “race suicide” and “human weeds” were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement.
And, indeed, the ACORN hasn’t fallen very far from the tree.
Thanks to examples like Irving Fisher, we know what the elites of a bygone era would have done with that kind of information: they would have empowered the state (and the medical establishment) to determine which fetal lives should be carried to term, and which should be culled for the good of the population as a whole.
That scenario is all but unimaginable in today’s political climate. But given our society’s track record with prenatal testing for Down syndrome, we also have a pretty good idea of what individuals and couples will do with comprehensive information about their unborn child’s potential prospects. In 90 percent of cases, a positive test for Down syndrome leads to an abortion. It is hard to imagine that more expansive knowledge won’t lead to similar forms of prenatal selection on an ever-more-significant scale.
Of course, if the parents have been properly conditioned by the Crust-controlled academic and media establishment, government doesn’t even really need to get involved. Like cultural mimes, they are hemmed in by walls that only they and their compadres can see.
June 23rd, 2012 at 14:23
The difference between eugenics then and now is that then it was a state-sponsored movement whereas now it’s a matter of private choice.
Herein lies the fundamental dilemma of libertarian thought: What happens when the individual’s freedom of choice (which they champion relentlessly) results in choices which are–at least to many–morally abhorrent?
It’s the same problem that we are currently having with the ‘Arab Spring’. We’re all for self-determination and democracy, but what happens when a government is democratically elected who hates us, hates our values, and holds philisophical views which are diametrically opposed to what we in the West would consider good governance and/or good communal morality?
Be careful what you wish for.