Image from the time.
Posted on 12/29/2008 4:45:27 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Thanks for your response
> It should NOT under any circumstances, be forced on us by the government or any other elitist, we-know-what’s-good-for-you-even-if-you-don’t group.
Now that is an interesting twist. You see it as a personal liberties issue, it would seem. That makes sense, and is a natural extension from the Ethics issue.
Fair to say that I learn something new just about every day on the FRee Republic. Today it has been all about Eugenics.
Time spent on this Forum is time well invested.
“These classes... contain the people who complain that they are starving for lack of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them.”
That sentence, or a variation of it, is repeated on FR every week; I hear it daily among business and professional people. The reasons are just as Havelock Ellis stated them: “inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity”.
Some people were meant to live a subsistence existence in an agrarian environment — watching animals, seeing that plants get adequate water, rooting out weeds, doing harvest work. For thousand of years, that is how people lived. The industrial revolution changed all that; unable to adapt (feeble-mindedness?) these people became superfluous. We in civilized Europe and America have provided a safety net of welfare for these people, but what do you do when the economy contracts and these people keep breeding?
The problem is made worse by the fact that large numbers of these people are congregated in cities. A few years ago, I looked at murder statistics for my state. Almost all the murders take place in the most populous counties. Smaller (and much poorer) counties seldom have these crimes. Why?
I don't have a solution. I don't think anybody on earth does. The solutions proposed by Ellis and Sanger, as you point out, led straight to Nazi race theory. However, if you ignore the problem, you get the Paris mobs of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik chaos of 1917, and appeals to disaffected masses in Africa, Asia, Europe, and yes, the United States by Islamofascists (2008).
“Even so, come, Lord Jesus”
Come on, man! "Hereditary pauperism"? Of course it is bad science. Ellis's article should be illustration enough. But read more on it here: Inbred Science
but rather that it is “unethical science” or “evil science” that we as humans oughtn’t to meddle with.
Eugenics poses a problem for Darwinians. Because if one cannot breed humans like dogs to obtain desired breeds (artificial selection), then neither can nature do it by natural selection. So a Darwinian biologist must affirm, in the back of his mind, the scientific validity of eugenics. He may say that it is immoral, or undesirable. Or he may feel that it is desirable, but not politically wise to talk about it. Then there is the type who thinks it is good science and desirable and politically expedient. Richard Dawkins (like Julian Huxley) is that type. He says that we can breed musical geniuses by eugenic selection. He has a heavy ideological commitment to Darwinism, so he has to say that. Because if eugenics is a false science, so is Darwinism.
That is very much an "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" statement.
Could the human race, if treated as nothing more than animal stock, be changed through selective breeding? Yes, it certainly could. A lot of genetic problems could be removed by not allowing those who are carriers of them to breed. Similarly, desirable traits could be selectively chosen to be spread more widely or even universally.
The only real problem in that case is that the "breeding stock" has the same lifespan as those making the eugenics decisions. If you are breeding cattle or dogs, you can get a new generation every couple of years or so, thus during a career a breeder can handle a couple dozen generations. You might only get two complete generations during a career of a eugenicist.
However, the morality of it is the primary issue. Who would have the right to tell another whether or not to have children and that some of those children should be killed because they have genetically undesirable traits and society's resources shouldn't be "wasted" on them? Would you trust our current Congressional Clowns to make those decisions? Would you want a Kennedy (or, perhaps worse, a Clinton) deciding on the eugenics goals? Would we be bred for the population's benefit, or only the benefit of those deciding what the breeding goals are?
” If we seek to classify the feeble-minded, taken in the largest mass, with reference not to their forms but to the degree of their mental defectiveness, they may be said (following Damaye’s classification) to fall into four groups:
1. Complete idiots who live a merely vegetative existence;
2. incomplete idiots with few and rudimentary ideas;
3. imbeciles, with limited and often perverted ideas, but capable of being taught to read and write; and
4. the weak-minded who can be educated to a varying extent by special methods.”
I saw this and started categorizing the people I work with...
I had that book out of the library just recently.
How do you know?
Look at the situation in our country right now. Young girls, ages 12, 13, and 14, are rewarded for having babies. These girls are not the brightest, most accomplished in the population.
Anyone who thinks our welfare system is not selectively breeding hasn't looked at the numbers.
>>”Because people are not animals nor a commodity.”<<
People and animals are too a commodity. Who does your taxes? Certainly not a retarded person, I hope. Your choice of the smartest most highly qualified person is yours to make.
As for your statement that animals are not a commodity tells me that you are not a farmer or raise animals for market. ‘High yield’ vegetables have been produced through vast scientific research to give you more for your buck. You'll notice this the next time you go to the store and rummage through the veggies to pick out that certain perfect apple, etc. That apple was genetically bred to give the highest shine, sugar content, taste and appearance to entice you into buying it. Your purchase confirms the grower's assumption and you are then, in turn, condoning the continued genetic creation of the ‘perfect’ apple.
When you go to the market with a sickly steer that was the product of a sickly mother-father you will get less money for your stock. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this continued behavior will not allow them to remain in farming-ranching business much longer.
Both humans and animals are a commodity. Never look for a potential mate at a free clinic!
Do you mean 'unfit' in the evolutionary sense, i.e., genetically?
We in civilized Europe and America have provided a safety net of welfare for these people, but what do you do when the economy contracts and these people keep breeding?
If you say that these people "breed", then you must mean that they are a genetic or evolutionary variant of man, different from the rest. I.e., they are paupers genetically, and pass down their pauperism genetically. This is much like R.A. Fisher, who argued that upperclass British twits and the lower class are two different evolutionary variants of man. Upon reflecting, do you think any of this is true?
Just because we *can* technically do something doesn’t mean that we *have* to or *ought* to or *must* do it.
That pretty well sums it up, I'd say.
It goes to show the danger of divorcing science from any moral constraints. This is the danger that those who wish to keep *religion* out of science fail to see.
Science can deal with the *can* part. Religion deals with the *ought not to* part.
That's also the crux of the embryonic stem cell research issue. And the euthanasia issue.
I didn’t say that animals aren’t a commodity. Please reread that sentence again, more carefully.
Perhaps it would help if I inserted a comma.....
”Because people are not animals, nor a commodity.”
It’s a compound sentence from:
People are not animals.
People are not a commodity.
Anyway, I think I get what you’re trying to point out about the accountant. But that is not in the sense that I meant.
People are not just breeding stock for the wishes of the few for some unknown purpose. The last thing I want is some power hungry despot deciding who gets to live or die or breed based on their arbitrary standards of what it *best* for humanity.
Because nurture plays such a key role in developing the full potential of the innate intelligence a person is born with, there is no way that anyone can adequately make the judgment of what that potential is when a particular individual is born. Least of all some government politician.
Solzhenitsyn rightly points out that genetics (nature) vs (environment) nurture are two sides of the same materialistic coin. We are supposed to choose one or a mixture of both. However, those of us who believe in a spiritual component to man should reject this false dichotomy.
I agree, but for those who don’t have the concept of the spiritual component, there has to be some way of convincing them.
Look for one in the hog-pen, where the commodities gather.
Some things just have to be rejected. Such as the idea that men have no souls. That is the idea behind nature vs. nurture, and behind the notion that people can be bred like dogs to slobber less, be good around children, and pay their bills on time.
I mean “unfit” in the sense of non-adaptability. A “fit” person adapts to changes. Is this a genetic trait? Nature or nurture? I think both, and that the culture of “the group” reinforces tendencies that are already there.
Notwithstanding all the silly movies that have been put out where an aristocrat marries a pauper and creates children that are good-old-just-like-me-and-you Americans, in general, upper-class British twits tend to marry other upper-class British twits. The lower-class people do likewise. Theodore Dalrymple, one of the best authors writing today, tells tales of these people that would curl your hair.
Different evolutionary variants? I can’t say, because, like everybody else on earth, I don’t know the mix of nature and nurture. Obviously, both play a part. But having observed my children’s and grandchildren’s classmates, I know that you can’t put a quart into a one pint container. What do we do with the one pint containers?
Having read the intervening posts between 30 and 36, I want to say that I believe that the poorest panhandler has a soul that is no more debased than the finest aristocrat. ALL have sinned and come short of the Glory of God.
My points are in reference to sociological and economic problems confronted by all societies.
Image from the time.
Eugenics would only work well if I were King.
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