Saturday, January 6, 2018

Eugenics and the Left

From The Guardian:
We could respond to all this the way we react when reading of Churchill's dismissal of Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir" or indeed of his own attraction to eugenics, by saying it was all a long time ago, when different norms applied. That is a common response when today's left-liberals are confronted by the eugenicist record of their forebears, reacting as if it were all an accident of time, a slip-up by creatures of their era who should not be judged by today's standards. Except this was no accident. The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their leftwing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, leftwing reasons.

They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies? The aim was to do what was best for society, and society would clearly be better off if there were more of the strong to carry fewer of the weak.

What was missing was any value placed on individual freedom, even the most basic freedom of a human being to have a child. The middle class and privileged felt quite ready to remove that right from those they deemed unworthy of it.

Eugenics went into steep decline after 1945. Most recoiled from it once they saw where it led – to the gates of Auschwitz. The infatuation with an idea horribly close to nazism was steadily forgotten. But we need a reckoning with this shaming past. Such a reckoning would focus less on today's advances in selective embryology, and the ability to screen out genetic diseases, than on the kind of loose talk about the "underclass" that recently enabled the prime minister to speak of "neighbours from hell" and the poor as if the two groups were synonymous. (Read more.)
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1 comment:

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

"The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their leftwing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, leftwing reasons."

I do know Edith Nesbit was a Fabian.

I do not recall she expressed anything like eugenics in her children's books, or the ones I read.

Nor have I heard of C. S. Lewis' favourites in her books, The Bastables, being eugenicist in such titles I have not read myself.

What is true is, eugenics was applied by leftists of some type in certain states of US and Canada, perhaps also already elsewhere, when it was condemned by Pope Pius XI - a condemnation I completely stand by.

There are people - for instance in France - who will condemn my writings by this figure of "guilt by association" :

Eugenics was promoted by Webbs who were Fabians, but Edith Nesbith was Fabian, C. S. Lewis (and I) read Edith Nesbit with relish, I read C. S. Lewis with relish, ergo, I am an eugenics promoting Fabian.

Of course, I could have taken a certain disinfectant (moral such) offered : declare I will have nothing to do with any economic proposal by the Fabians - including E. Nesbit's preference for pre-Industrial over Indutrialised and Capitalistic economy.

That nearly explicitly (or very transparently implicitly) offered disinfectant I have not taken.