Feeble-mindedness

It is necessary to remember that feeble-mindedness is largely handed on by heredity. It was formerly supposed that idiocy and feeble-mindedness are mainly due to environmental conditions -- to the drink, depravity, general disease, or lack of nutrition of the parents; and a few authorities on the feeble-minded still hold that view. But serious as the results of such bad environmental conditions may be, and frequent as they are in the parentage of the feeble-minded, they do not form the fundamental factor in the production of the feeble-minded, and some scientific authorities even deny that they can produce mental defect in the offspring at all, though that position is doubtless too extreme. Exact investigation is now showing that feeble-mindedness is inherited to an enormous extent. Some years ago Dr. Ashby, speaking from a large experience, estimated that at least 75 per cent, of feeble-minded children are born with an inherited tendency to mental defect. More precise investigation has since shown that this estimate was under the mark.

Not only is feeble-mindedness inherited, and in a much greater degree than has hitherto been suspected even by expert authorities, but the feeble-minded tend to have a much larger number of children than normal people. That, indeed, we might expect, apart altogether from the question of any innate fertility. The feeble-minded have no forethought and no self-restraint. They are not ordinarily capable of resisting their own impulses or the solicitations of others, and they are unable to understand adequately the motives which guide the conduct of ordinary people. The average number of children of feeble-minded people seems to be usually about one-third more than in normal families, and is sometimes very much greater.

Eichholz, another authority on the feeble-minded, found that in one group of defective families about 60 per cent, of the children died young. That is probably an unusually high proportion, and in Eichholz's cases it seems to have been associated with very unusually large families; but the infant mortality in such families is always very high.

This large early mortality of the offspring of the feeble-minded is, however, very far from settling the question of the disposal of the mentally defective, or we should not find large families of them propagated from generation to generation. The large number who die early merely serves, roughly speaking, to reduce the size of the abnormal family to the size of the normal family, and some authorities consider that it scarcely suffices to do this, for we must remember that there is a considerable mortality even in the so-called normal family during early life. Moreover, we have to consider the social disorder and the heavy expense which accompany this large infantile mortality. Illegitimacy is frequently the result of feeble-mindedness since feeble-minded women are peculiarly unable to resist temptation. A great number of such women are continually coming into the workhouses and giving birth to illegitimate children whom they are unable to support, and who often never become capable of supporting themselves, but in their turn tend to produce a new feeble-minded generation, more especially since the men who are attracted to these feeble-minded women are themselves -- according to the generally recognised tendency of the abnormal to be attracted to the abnormal -- feeble-minded or otherwise mentally defective. This is not only the cause of a great burden on the rates, but also a perpetual danger to society and a constant, it may be ever-increasing, depreciation of the quality of the race.

Moreover, by our present methods of charity we increase rather than diminish the evil, for, as Sir Edward Fry has well said, "the beneficence of one generation becomes the burthen and the injury of all succeeding ones." "Vastly more effective than ten million dollars to charity," remarks in the same spirit Dr. Davenport, the Director of the New York Station for Experimental Evolution, "would be ten millions to Eugenics. He who by such a gift should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility, and suffering would be the world's wisest philanthropist." There is no need to put such an expenditure of wealth in opposition to charity. It would be charity, and in accordance with the whole Christian conception and tradition of charity. But it would be charity according to knowledge, charity applied at the right spot, and not merely allowed to run to waste, or, worse, to turn to poison.

But it is not only in themselves that the feeble-minded are a burden on the present generation and a menace to future generations. They are seen to be even a more serious danger when we realise that in large measure they form the reservoir from which the predatory classes are recruited. This is, for instance, the case as regards the fallen. Feeble-minded girls, of fairly high grade, may often be said to be predestined to immorality if left to themselves, not because they are vicious, but because they are weak and have little power of resistance. They cannot properly weigh their actions against the results of their actions; and even if they are intelligent enough to do that, they are still too weak to regulate their actions accordingly. Moreover, even when, as often happens among the high-grade feeble-minded, they are quite able and willing to work, after they have lost their respectability by having a child the opportunities for work become more restricted, and they drift into prostitution. The association between prostitution and feeble-mindedness is intimate. Everywhere, there can be no doubt, a considerable proportion of these women were, at the very outset, in some slight degree feeble-minded, mentally and morally a little blunted through some taint of inheritance.

Criminality, again, is associated with feeble-mindedness in the most intimate way. Not only do criminals tend to belong to large families, but the families that produce feeble-minded offspring also produce criminals, while a certain degree of feeble-mindedness is extremely common among criminals, and the most hopeless and typical, though fortunately rare, kind of criminal, frequently termed a "moral imbecile" is nothing more than a feeble-minded person whose defect is shown not so much in his intelligence as in his feelings and his conduct. Even the possession of a considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life and concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with almost inconceivable stupidity.

Closely related to the great feeble-minded class, and from time to time falling into crime, are the inmates of workhouses, tramps, and the unemployable. The so-called "able-bodied" inmates of our workhouses are frequently found, on medical examination, to be in more than 50 per cent, cases mentally defective, equally so whether they are men or women. Tramps, by nature and profession, who overlap the workhouse population, and are estimated to number 20,000 to 50,000 in England and Wales, when the genuine unemployed are eliminated, are everywhere found to be a very degenerate class, among whom the most mischievous kinds of feeble-mindedness and mental perversion prevail, as well as the tendency to petty criminality and sometimes to more serious crime. Inebriates the people who are chronically and helplessly given to drink largely belong to the same great family, and do not so much become feeble-minded because they drink, but possess the tendency to drink because they have a strain of feeble-mindedness from birth.

These are the kind of people tramps, prostitutes, paupers, criminals, inebriates, all tending to be born a little defective who largely make up the great degenerate families whose histories are from time to time recorded. Such a family was that of the "Jukes" in America, who, in the course of five generations, produced 709 known descendants who were on the whole unfit for society, and have been a constant danger and burden to society. Yet another such family is that of the "Zeros." Three centuries ago they were highly respectable people living in a Swiss valley. But they intermarried with an insane stock, and subsequently married other women of an unbalanced nature. In recent times 310 members of this family have been studied, and it is found that vagrancy, feeble-mindedness, mental troubles, criminality, pauperism, immorality, are, as it may be termed, their patrimony.

These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organised activity, contain the people who complain that they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them.

It will be seen that in this sketch of the problem before us in an effort to regenerate the race, much stress is laid on the feeble-minded in the full sense of that term. Little has been said of insanity, which differs from feeble-mindedness by being acquired during life, though nearly always on a basis of inherited weakness. There is a reason for attempting to make this distinction, notwithstanding the fact that in many families feeble-mindedness is found side by side with insanity, and has indeed been said to be the tree upon which most insanities are grafted. Feeble-mindedness is an absolute dead weight on the race; it is an evil that is unmitigated. The heavy and complicated social burdens and injuries it inflicts on the present generation are without compensation, while the unquestionable fact that in all degrees it is highly inheritable renders it a deteriorating poison to the race; it depreciates the whole quality of a people. But insanity is not so fatal, so incurable, so altogether without compensation. The candidates for insanity may never become insane, or, having become insane, they may recover. Such candidates for insanity may be the best of people, above the average in intelligence, in conduct, in ideals; even in their eccentricities they may furnish a necessary element of variety and colour to life. We need not, in- deed, share the fear of those who think that if the insane disappeared or ceased to propagate there would be no more genius. It is certainly true that some men of the highest genius have themselves been on the borderland, and even over the borderland, of insanity, but if rarely or never happens that people of genius spring from parents who were definitely insane. If, however, we wish to attack these problems radically we are wise to concentrate ourselves, in the first place, on the problem of feeble-mindedness.

It is doubtless a significant fact that the districts with a high death-rate are also, as has lately been found, the districts with a high lunacy rate; the selection of death kills off the unfit, but it does not necessarily improve the quality of those it spares; though it seems, at all events, to make a rough attempt to preserve, on the whole, the level of life. But, whatever the exact action of natural selection may be, as soon as we begin to interfere with it and improve the conditions of life, by caring for the unfit, enabling them to survive and to propagate their like -- as they will not fail to do in so far as they belong to unfit stocks -- then we are certainly, without intending it, doing our best to lower the level of life. We increase, or at best retain, the unfit, while at the same time we burden the fit with the task of providing for the unfit. In this way we deteriorate the general quality of life in the next generation, except in so far as our improvement of the environment may enable some to remain fit who under less favourable conditions would join the unfit.

It is now possible for us to realise how the way lies open to the next great forward step in social reform. Our sense of social responsibility is becoming a sense of racial responsibility. It is that enlarged sense of responsibility which renders possible what we call the regeneration of the race.

It is only of recent years that it has been rendered possible. Until lately the methods of propagating the race continued to be the same as those of savages thousands of years ago. Children "came" and their parents disclaimed all responsibility for their coming; the children were sent by God, and if they all turned out to be idiots the responsibility was God's. That is all changed now. We have learnt that in this, as in other matters, the Divine force works through us, and that we are not entitled to cast the burden of our evil actions on to any Higher Power. It is we who are, more immediately, the creators of men. We generate the race; we alone can regenerate the race.

Galton, during the last years of his life, believed that we are approaching a time when eugenic considerations will become a factor of religion, and when our existing religious conceptions will be reinterpreted in the light of a sense of social needs so enlarged as to include the needs of the race which is to come. Certainly, for those who have been taught to believe that man was in the first place created by God, it should not be difficult to realise the Divine nature of the task of human creation which has since been placed in the hands of men, to recognise it as a practical part of religion, and to cherish the sense of its responsibilities.

If our new knowledge in this field is still very imperfect, there is one point concerning which general agreement may be said to be reached, and that is the desirability of breeding out, so far as possible, the feeble-minded. Even the Mendelian students of heredity, who, with considerable reason, regard inheritance as a highly complicated matter, conclude that, at all events, we may feel sure that it will be well, if possible, to eliminate the feeble-minded from the race. No doubt there are some who would regret the disappearance of weak-mindedness with its possibilities of the "divine fool," and so it may be as well to say that there is no chance of eliminating the occasional possibility of imbecility, or allied conditions, as a natural spontaneous variation. It is the feeble-minded families with their complicated and multiform ramifications which we may safely try to root up. That is why on previous pages it has been thought well to exhibit some of these ramifications of feeble-mindedness, and to show how much social and racial damage they cause. 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:

The need of confining and caring for the first two classes is fairly clear; the feeble-minded of the third class obviously require special attention because they are capable of being very mischievous. It is the large fourth class which presents the most difficult problem.

A considerable proportion of the higher grade feeble-minded can, with careful training, be taught to earn their living in the world. The bulk of them need to be isolated from the world in special institutions and colonies, where they can to some extent be utilised, where they will do no harm to themselves or others, and be reasonably safe from the risk of propagating their kind. This was the main recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-Minded in 1908. It will, however, be an expensive and costly measure if carried out on an adequate scale. It must also be remembered that the improved education and training of the hereditary feeble-minded, in order to fit them for some work in the world at large, will not enable them to produce any fitter offspring than if they had remained untaught and untrained. In view of these considerations it seems desirable to supplement the recommendations of the Royal Commission by the adoption of methods for rendering those of the feeble-minded who are free to move about in the world unable to propagate their kind, as can now be done in simple and harmless ways. The feeble-minded, realising their own weakness, are often willing, and even anxious, to be in this way protected against themselves. To make such a practice compulsory, or to apply it to criminals who are not hereditarily feeble-minded, would not only be on many grounds undesirable, but it would unnecessarily discredit the method. It is the more reasonable, as well as the more Christian plan, to allow the unfit to make themselves "eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven's sake" and not as a punishment.

Even, however, if we confine our preventive methods to the feeble-minded our problem still remains very extensive, for we have to remember that feeble-mindedness accounts for a large part of that burden of pauperism which the gigantic machinery of the Poor Law was devised to deal with, and which a Royal Commission investigated in the most elaborate detail only a few years ago. That Commission, in the ponderous volumes jt produced, set forth some excellent recommendations on matters of detail. But it failed to go to the root of the matter and devised no method for damming the stream of pauperism at its source. The more perfectly the Poor Law machinery works, the more it encourages the evil it seeks to deal with. That is so because of the nature of the human material composing the great bulk of pauperism. It is mentally defective, so that the workhouse (which seems so awful a fate to ordinary poor people) is as welcome to the pauper as the prison often is to the criminal. An investigation not long since carried out at the instance of the Council of the Eugenics Education Society, though not extensive in its scope, perhaps brings us nearer to the remedy for pauperism than ill the elaborate recommendations of the Royal Commissioners. It was found that paupers tend to belong to pauper families, even to the fourth generation, and that they tend to intermarry with pauper families; it was also found that they tend to manifest more or less obvious signs of mental weakness, and the conclusion was inevitable that their hereditary pauperism was based on an inheritance of mental defect. It is obvious that all our philanthropy directed to the present generation only will not remove this kind of pauperism but rather increase it; we need to extend our philanthropy to the generations to come. And if, for instance, we resolved, with all proper precautions, in the case of these defective paupers of the second, third, or later generations, not to give Poor Law relief, except to those who had voluntarily consented, as a condition of such relief, to undergo the preventive surgical treatment referred to , we should be effectively working for the abolition of pauperism.

In these simple and practical ways by specially training the feeble-minded, by confining them in suitable institutions and colonies, and by voluntary sacrifice of procreative power on the part of those who are able to work in the world we shall be able, even in a single generation, largely to remove one of the most serious and burdensome taints in our civilisation, and so mightily work for the regeneration of the race.

In the great garden of life it is not otherwise than in our public gardens. We repress the license of those who, to gratify their own childish or perverted desires, would pluck up the shrubs or trample on the flowers, but in so doing we achieve freedom and joy for all. If in our efforts to better social conditions and to raise the level of the race we seek to cultivate the sense of order, to encourage sympathy and foresight, to pull up racial weeds by the roots, it is not that we may kill freedom and joy, but rather that we may introduce the conditions for securing and increasing freedom and joy. In these matters, indeed, the gardener in his garden is our symbol and our guide. The beginning of the world is figured as an ordered and yet free life of joy in a garden. All our efforts for the regeneration of the race can be but a feeble attempt to bring a little nearer that vision of Paradise.

There is one known example of human selective breeding working well.

In the 19th Century, a large number of idealistic northern-European communes formed in one of the counties of western New York State. One of them, while believing in marriage, also followed their leaders view that he should select who would reproduce with whom. The resultant children would be raised by the mother and her husband as their own. His decisions were of the order of, “You are smart and you are strong, so make a child.”

Just based on his guesses, in three generations, that small commune produced about 60 national leaders in diverse fields. However, had it continued just one more generation, there would have been “genetic collapse”, resulting in a large number of failed pregnancies and retardation and deformity, because of inbreeding.

Currently, the Chinese are unsuccessfully attempting to do the same, but are failing because their selection criteria are severely flawed.

For example, having people in their breeding program because they are ideologically correct, politically connected, wealthy, or have a genius in one field. They also began with too small a genetic pool, so are having inbreeding problems.

Interesting read. Not sure about state-sponsored sterilization, but I’ve often and not-quite-seriously entertained the idea to give all 15 year old boys vasectomies (whch are reversible) and only had the procedure to reverse allowed after say completion of college or 10 years of solid work history or joined the military perhaps we might diminish the steady entropic drift of society while not descending ourselves into Brave New World-class evil. I know of one malefactor receiving welfare in 4 adjacent states who has fathered 113 children with scores of women and never once held a job nor raised a single one of these children. I’m quite sure this is not the record, but it serves to illustrate my point.

Eugenics is evil...it was the basis for the final solution in Hitler’s Germany. On a personal note, My wife’s great Aunt suffered some sort of breakdown during WWII. She was lobotomized and sterilized in a hospital near Richmond VA. If you had ever met this woman...you would not be so flippant about this evil belief-Eugenics.

> If you had ever met this woman...you would not be so flippant about this evil belief-Eugenics.

Excuse me? I am not aware of being “flippant” about eugenics. I knew next to nothing about it, so I asked questions and drew conclusions. Something wrong with that?

> 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?

There is a clear danger in the Scientific Method, then, because Morality tends to play little-or-no role in the exploration of scientific knowledge.

Or, for that matter, in the advance of Technology.

So we have these hugely “interesting” fields for Science to explore — like eugenics, birth control, euthenasia, germ warfare, chemical warfare, &tc — where the constraints aren’t scientific or technical in nature: they are and ought to be Moral and Ethical constraints.

But science isn’t really geared to constrain itself morally and ethically, and scientists don’t like it when people constrain them.

That has to be a problem!

> 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.

Well said.

> 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.

But I haven’t seen any compelling evidence to suggest that humans cannot be bred like dogs. If anything, heuristic and anecdotal evidence suggests that humans have very strong family traits that do get passed along from one generation to another.

Therefore, Darwin is probably correct.

(I believe that Evolution and Creation coexist very well. Evolution tells us how things happened, and Creation tells us why.)

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.

Yes, there are all kinds of sociological problems, mostly caused by spiritual factors. However, the eugenist says that these problems of man are genetic. They are due to tainted germplasm. Which means that a man suffering from supposed "hereditary pauperism" may pull himself out of pauperism, but his germplasm is still tainted. So his descendants will be paupers, regardless of what he did with himself. In this eugenic world-view, people of unfortunate circumstances and lifestyles, such as prostitutes, drunks, the chronically unemployed, the so-called feeble-minded, those mired in vices etc, cannot be redeemed. It matters not one whit if they found faith in Christ and turned themselves around, their genetic material is tainted. So, according to the eugenists, they must be sterilized, segragated, euthanized, or whatever.

It seems to be not well known that Pol Pot was a eugenist. He believed that political dispositions were biological. He killed about 2,000,000 people who suffered from 'incurable incorrect political dispositions', leaving the ones who had correct political inclinations. Not that this made any difference though. You would think that the elimination of all that political incorrectness would have resulted in a good politically correct Khmer Rouge society today, with or without him--if it were true that humans can be bred like dogs, that is.

God created plants for their simplicity…
He created animals for their innocence…
He created man for his intellect.

God said to “Be fruitful and multiply… subdue the Earth,” and he gave man dominion over every lower creature.

Animals are living creatures, having the spirit of life breathed into them, they are not eternal creatures possessing a soul; but human beings are not animals. Every human individual is created in God’s image, meaning each possesses free will, an intellect, and an eternal soul. We are more than flesh and blood having a spirit of life breathed into our nostrils by God, Our Father in Heaven. Man is destined for eternity, and, if we accept the grace of Christ, we become adopted sons of God, and thus heirs to His eternal Kingdom.

What God creates, he creates for a divine purpose, which He alone knows. Humans procreate, but do so only by God’s command and His authority. Man merely cooperates in the procreative act. It is God who fashions the human soul at the moment of conception, and who knits together the bone and sinew within our mother’s womb: “Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations.” Jeremiah 1:5 (Catholic Douay Rheimes Bible)

For this reason, all genetic tampering, manipulation, and other such techniques of human “breeding” are intrinsically evil, and thus immoral in practice, whatsoever.

I am replying to all people who post here. Ray Kurzweil has given us an idea of what might happen in the future. Workplace automation might cause pressure on humans to take some genetic enhancements in order to keep up with automation in the workplace. People will compete with each other and with software or robotics. It is possible that many professional or vocational occupations will be absorbed by workplace automation.

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