Eugenics--They're Making a Comeback

Plaidder's Handy Guide to the Wonderful World of Eugenics

Frequently Asked Questions (or rather, questions that should be frequently asked):

What is "eugenics" anyway?

Eugenics is a branch of biology that first began to be developed in the late nineteenth century in England after Darwin's evolutionary theories had begun to be accepted. It reached its heyday in England during the first two decades of the twentieth century, but fell into disrepute after World War II after the Nazi's version of eugenics horrified the rest of the world. Essentially, eugenicists studied heredity in humans with the idea of trying to "improve" the human race. They advocated doing this by setting up systems that would encourage those people who were judged "fit" to reproduce while discouraging--through sterilization if necessary--those who were "unfit" from doing the same. If you're an old-series Star Trek fan you probably remember eugenics from the episode "Space Seed"--Khan and all his buddies were supposedly the product of a eugenist experiment. Eugenics as a science was a response to fears that society was degenerating and that people were becoming physically weaker, more stupid, and more "defective" (a term that covered everything from mental retardation to blindness)--it argued that all this could be reversed through a program of "racial hygiene" that would ensure that people chose the proper breeding partner and thus passed on their good qualities.

So what's wrong with that?

Eugenics is, as far as I'm concerned, an evil thing because it is based on the premise that all humans are not created equal, and that there are large sections of any human population that are biologically "inferior" and need to be eliminated one way or another. As you can probably tell already, the basic doctrine of eugenics can be, and has been, used to justify any form of prejudice a group in power might have against a group that isn't. In England, this prejudice was not so much race-based as class-based; the target of most eugenist rhetoric was the urban poor, who were seen as physically and intellectually weaker as well as morally feeble. Eugenics was also used to justify a number of repressive laws concerning the treatment of people with mental or physical disabilities--there's at least one record of a speaker at a eugenics conference suggesting that such people should be deported or stranded on desert islands, but in practice what happened was that they were rounded up and institutionalized.

When eugenics migrated across the channel to Germany, it became far more dangerous in the hands of the Nazis, who were not content to wait for selective breeding to take care of their "degenerates" and favored more direct and immediate action. Many of the horrors we now associate with the Third Reich--medical experimentation on humans, the internment and subsequent murder of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled, the acceptance of horrifically racist conceptions of what made someone "fit" or a "good German"--can be traced directly or indirectly to the influence of eugenics. Hitler also pursued more specifically eugenicist projects, such as trying to encourage "good German" women to have more children.

The problem with eugenics, then, is that it provides a scientific justification for the kind of hatred and bigotry that has been with us since we started walking this planet. In this country, so far, it has not resulted in a holocaust, but its effects are still felt in governmental policies and in some areas of the sciences, where the racist biases inherent in the eugenist approach have never been eradicated.

Such as...?

Well, I'm glad you asked. There are a few major ways in which eugenist thought is still shaping American policy:

Welfare. Much of the rhetoric about welfare--from both sides of the aisle--is heavily influenced by the doctrine of differential fertility, which was a central component of eugenics as it was first developed. The early eugenists were convinced that the poor tended to be more fertile than the rich, which meant according to them that eventually the poor would grossly outnumber the rest of the population; and since eugenics assumes that the poor are mentally, physically and morally inferior, this would imply the degeneration and destruction of the human race. A lot of energy was spent thinking of ways to close this "fertility gap" and make the rich breed faster while making the poor breed more slowly.

This desire to curb population growth among the poor was not originally based on economics, although that's what people use to justify it now. From the eugenist point of view, poor people were poor because that was what they were fit for; a lot of research was done to prove that poverty was the result of heredity rather than social conditions. How many children a poor woman had was irrelevant in terms of whether those childern would ever escape from poverty, since their biology doomed them to it. The overriding concern was that by breeding more of these biologically inferior children poor mothers would increase the proportion of physically, mentally and morally unfit individuals in the British race and thus drag it down into the depths of degeneracy.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it may be because a lot of the talk we hear nowadays about the rising numbers of illegitimate children is a thinly-veiled expression of the same fear, the only difference being that instead of openly admitting that they want to stop poor people and/or African-Americans (Republicans have been working hard to make sure "poor" and "African-American" are synonymous in the American imagination) from breeding, the anti-welfare camp pretends that the problem is that these children are born out of wedlock. "Illegitimate" becomes a code word for "poor," and family-values rhetoric is brought in to cover up the real motivation behind the anti-welfare movement.

You may have noticed that there was a slight contradiction in the Republicans' Contract for America, which on the one hand advocated cutting welfare benefits for mothers who continued to have children while on welfare and on the other hand favored giving middle-class families a tax cut for every child they had. To do Newt and friends justice, this piece of hypocrisy did not originate with them. The Eugenics Education Society, founded in England in 1907, also suggested a tax cut for each child a family had. The EES, however, came right out and admitted that the beauty of this plan was that only families who were above a certain income level would pay enough taxes to profit from it, so that it would encourage breeding only among the wealthy and not among the poor.

As long as eugenist assumptions about the inferiority of the poor (and of non-Europeans) and eugenist paranoia about differential fertility go unchallenged in this country, welfare policy will continue to try to prevent poor and/or African-American mothers from having more children, and in doing so will continue to punish those children and their mothers for the crime of increasing the "unfit" segment of the population. We have seen in the past few years growing support for purely punitive measures, such as cutting mothers off if they have a second child or, in extreme cases, requiring women who continue having children to be sterilized. As science, this approach is horrendously out of date; as policy, it is sickening. The right to choose entails the a woman's right to have a child, not just her right to abort one, and she is entitled to that right whether she is above or below the poverty line.

Intelligence Testing. One of the main tenets of eugenist thought was that intelligence was hereditary--that you got your basic smarts from your parents and their ancestors and that learning was a secondary process that might enhance your natural capabilities but couldn't substitute for raw talent. Intelligence was seen as one of the main criteria of "fitness" and a lot of effort went into developing ways to measure it and thereby pick out the "fit" folks who should be cultivated and encouraged to breed. Cyril Burt, the man in charge of intelligence testing in the British elementary school system during the 'teens, was a member of the Eugenics Education Society and, not surprisingly, "discovered" a correlation between low intelligence and poverty. In order to prove this, Burt soon started having to fudge his data, and by the end of his career he may even have been inventing phantom collaborators and supporting studies that did not exist. But because Burt's thesis could be used to justify preferential treatment for the children of middle-class or rich families, and to justify neglecting the children of poor ones, it was accepted at the time.

What we see in something like The Bell Curve is the resurgence of Burt's particular brand of eugenics, which seeks to justify discrimination against the poor by proving that they are poor not because of societal prejudice but because they are naturally less intelligent than the rich. This conveniently absolves the rich of any responsibility for trying to educate or otherwise help the poor, since genetic predisposition is not something social policy can change. In America, this prejudice against the poor easily translates into prejudice against ethnic minorities and especially against African-Americans, since racism has kept large numbers of African-Americans below the poverty line, and since in conservative rhetoric and in the popular imagination "poor" is often equated with "African-American." Thus, we have people arguing that African-Americans are on the average less intelligent than whites, and that this explains why so many of them are still below the poverty line.

As long as we continue to hang onto the eugenist idea of intelligence as hereditary, and to discount the role that education and socialization play in the formation and measurement of intellectual ability, intelligence testing will still be used to justify keeping whatever groups are designated as "inferior" out of colleges and in poverty. The emphasis that anti-affirmative action agitators often put on SAT scores is an echo of Burt's argument--the implicit statement is that the SAT measures some kind of inherent, unchangeable intelligence necessary for successfully completing college, and that if African-Americans tend to score lower on these tests it's not because the tests are culturally biased, but because African-Americans just aren't as smart. As someone who taught SAT prep courses, I have always regarded this argument as bogus, since I know from experience that you can raise a student's SAT score without in any way making him or her more intelligent.

Reproductive rights. If the "fertility gap" that eugenists fear is going to be closed, suppressing fertility among the poor is not enough; it also has to be encouraged among the rich. Hence, the tax cut already discussed. Hence, also, in my opinion, some of the hysteria about birth control and abortion on the right. Early eugenists, while concerned about a potential population explosion, were often against birth control because they feared that only "responsible" people--i.e., the rich--would use it, which would actually make the fertility gap worse. For the same reason they would have opposed abortion except in cases where the child was "defective" or the parents were poor. I'm not arguing that there are not other reasons why the right might be militating against a woman's right to control her own reproductive functions, but I think that the desire to close the "fertility gap" has got to be one of them. It would also explain why, on those pro-life commercials that show you children who could have been aborted or show you women imagining the children they could have brought to term but aborted, the child in question is frequently white, often male, and always well-groomed and healthy. The right is afraid that women are aborting these potentially "fit" children and leaving the "unfit"--the poor and the non-white--to do the bulk of the reproducing.

Yikes! This is all pretty creepy. How can this be stopped?

I think the first step is education. Disseminate the URL to this page to interested parties. You can also learn more about the history of eugenics in the books listed below, from which most of the information in this summary was taken:

Harris, Jose. Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870-1914. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1993.
Jones, Greta. Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
Mazumdar, Pauline M.H. Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain. London: Routledge, 1992. [This is the most comprehensive history of the Eugenics movement itself; the others talk more about its impact on other aspects of society.]
Soloway, Richard A. Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.

If enough people understand where this kind of rhetoric comes from, maybe it will start to lose some of its power. That's what I hope, anyway. Meanwhile, the only thing we can do is try to keep Newt and his cohorts as far away from the reins of power as possible.