Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century

The Jews

Don’t do what I do, do what I tell you.
Everyone’s father

The popular impression is that the eugenics movement was a racist, anti-Semitic Nazi ideology inspired by Anglo-American elites.

In point of fact, eugenics also managed to establish strong bridgeheads in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.125 Jews played a modest but active role in the early eugenics movement. In 1916, Rabbi Max Reichler published an article entitled “Jewish Eugenics,” in which he attempted to demonstrate that Jewish religious customs were eugenic in thrust.

A decade and a half later Ellsworth Huntington, in his book Tomorrow’s Children, which was published in conjunction with the directors of the American Eugenics Society, echoed Reichler’s arguments, praising the Jews as being of uniquely superior stock and explaining their achievements by a systematic adherence to the basic principles of Jewish religious law, which he also viewed as being fundamentally eugenic in nature.126 In the Weimar Republic many Jewish socialists actively campaigned for eugenics, using the Socialist newspaper Vorwärts as their chief tribune.127 Max Levien, head of the first Munich Soviet, and Julius Moses, a member of the German Socialist Party, believed strongly in eugenics. A partial list of prominent German-Jewish eugenicists would include the geneticists Richard Goldschmidt, Heinrich Poll, and Curt Stern, the statistician Wilhelm Weinberg (coauthor of the Hardy-Weinberg Law), the mathematician Felix Bernstein, and the physicians Alfred Blaschko, Benno Chajes, Magnus Hirschfeld, Georg Löwenstein, Max Marcuse, Max Hirsch, and Albert Moll.128

The German League for Improvement of the People and the Study of Heredity was even attacked by the Nazi publisher Julius F. Lehmann as targeted subversion on the part of Berlin Jews.129 Löwenstein was a member of an underground resisting the National Socialist government, and Chajes, Goldschmidt, Hirschfeld, and Poll emigrated. In America, when the revolutionary anarchist editor of the American Journal of Eugenics, Moses Harman, died in 1910, Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth took over distribution. In 1933, the eugenicist and University of California professor of zoology Samuel Jackson Holmes noted the significant number of Jews in the eugenics movement and praised their “native endowment of brains,” while at the same time lamenting the racial bias suffered by the Jews, which caused many of their intellectuals to be wary of nonegalitarian worldviews.130

The American Eugenics Society itself counted Rabbi Louis Mann as one of its directors, in 1935.One of the most prominent eugenicists was the American Herman Muller, whose mother was Jewish and who received the Nobel Prize in medicine, in 1946, for his work on genetic mutation rates. A communist, Muller spent 1933-1937 as a senior geneticist at the University of Moscow, when he wrote a letter to Stalin proposing that the Soviet Union adopt eugenics as an official policy. It was the eve of the Great Purges, and Stalin definitely disapproved of the idea, at which point Muller judged it wisest to leave for Scotland and then returned to the United States. It was in the middle of his Moscow sojourn that Muller’s eugenics treatise Out of the Night appeared in the United States. In 1932, Muller had spent a year in Germany and he was outraged by Nazi concepts and policies concerning race.

According to the National Library in Jerusalem, from the 1920s through the 1950s, some 200 Hebrew-language Parents’ manuals were published. These publications contained a coherent worldview, of which eugenics formed an integral part, subjecting Jewish mothers to an unremitting program of education, indoctrination and regulation. During the British mandate, Jewish physicians in Palestine actively promoted eugenics. Dr. Joseph Meir, for whom the hospital in Kfar Sava is named, wrote in 1934:

Who should be allowed to raise children? Seeking the right answer to this question, eugenics is the science that tries to refine the human race and keep it from decaying. This science is still young, but it has enormous advantages…. Is it not our duty to insure that our children will be healthy, both physically and mentally? For us, eugenics in general, and mainly the careful prevention of hereditary illnesses, has a much higher value than in other nations. Doctors, athletes, and politicians should spread the idea widely: Do not have children unless you are sure that they will be healthy, both mentally and physically.131

One researcher at Ben-Gurion University working on the topic “eugenicist Zionists,” came across a card file with notes written by the editors of a collection of Meir’s writings, published in Israel in the mid-1950s where the editors call the article “problematic and dangerous” and comment that “Now, after Nazi eugenics, it is dangerous to publish this article.”132 In point of fact, knowledge of Jewish support for eugenics in pre-1948 Palestine was suppressed for many years.133 Dr. Max Nordau, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, was converted to Zionism by Theodore Herzl and became prominent in the movement. Nordau’s ideas, which including vigorously propagandizing eugenics, became so popular in the Jewish community that Nordau Clubs were created even in the United States.

Dr. Arthur Ruppin, the head of the World Zionist Organization office in Palestine, wrote in his book The Sociology of the Jews that “in order to preserve the purity of our race, such Jews [showing signs of genetic defects] must refrain from having children.”134

In Israel today many eugenic practices have become widely accepted. According to Meira Weiss of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, In Israel, the Zionists’ eugenics turned into a selective prenatal policy backed by state-of-the-art genetic technology. 135

There are now more fertility clinics per capita there than in any other country in the world (four times the number per capita in the United States). Abortion is subsidized if the fetus is suspected to be physically or mentally malformed.136 In cases where the husband’s sperm is not viable, donors fill out extensive health histories. The State supplies the sperm, which is screened for Tay-Sachs. Women over thirtyfive routinely consent to amniocentesis tests and abort if genetic defects are discovered. Thus, the government is actively pursuing eugenics, although the chief motivation appears to be as least as much quantitative as qualitative. Surrogacy was legalized in 1996137, but only for married women. It too is paid for by the State. Jewish religious law does not delegitimize the children of unmarried women, thus making it possible to combine Jewish legal principles with modern legal practices. In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are preferred by some rabbis as a form of fertility treatment that does not violate the literal Halakhic precepts against adultery138.

Curiously, some rabbis refuse to condemn the use of non-Jewish sperm, since masturbation by non-Jews is not of explicit rabbinic concern, and also because Jewishness is passed exclusively through the mother. Children born to different Jewish mothers using the same sperm donor may even marry, since “they share no substance.” Other rabbis, however, consider the use of non-Jewish sperm an abomination. 139

The Israeli attitude toward cloning differs considerably from that prevalent in most other countries. Although human reproductive cloning is currently not permitted because the technology is not yet considered safe, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel sees no inherent religious interdiction in reproductive cloning as a form of treatment for infertility and even sees an advantage over sperm donation, which by using anonymous donors might subsequently lead to a marriage between brother and sister.140 In 1998, although more than eight decades had passed since the appearance of Reichler’s 1916 essay, Noam J. Zohar, a professor of philosophy at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, responded to Reichler. Noting that Reichler’s emphatically pro-eugenics views were “shared… by more than a few Judaic circles today,” Zohar wrote that A program of individualized eugenics… would seem to be consonant with an attitude that was, at the very least, tacitly endorsed by traditional Judaic teachings.

Should it make a difference if the means for producing fine offspring are no longer determined by moralized speculation but instead by evidence-based genetic science? It seems to me that, insofar as the goal itself is acceptable, the change in the means for its advancement need pose no obstacle to its pursuit. This is so of course provided that the new means are not morally objectionable. To work out a Judaic response to the sort of new eugenics now looming on our horizon it will be necessary to evaluate the various specific means that might serve a modern individualized eugenics. I hope that some of the groundwork for that has been laid in this examination of traditional Judaic voices.141

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The Suppression of Eugenics

Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even.

Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.

Roger Price
“The Great Roob Revolution”

Although the attack on eugenics had been launched in the late 1920s,142 eugenics survived even the embrace of Nazi Germany, and in 1963 the Ciba Foundation convened a conference in London under the title “Man and His Future,” at which three distinguished biologists and Nobel Prize laureates (Herman Muller, Joshua Lederberg, and Francis Crick) all spoke strongly in its favor. Despite this upbeat note, eugenics was about to undergo a total rout. Outraged by pictures of police dogs attacking civil rights protesters in the South, the public found discussions of genetic racial differences intolerable. In 1974, a large group of black students descended upon the office of Professor Sandra Scarr in the Institute of Child Development of the University of Minnesota:

One graduate student in education said he was going to kill us if we continued to do research on black children. Another paced up and down in front of us calling, “honkie, honkie, honkie.”

When Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley visited the Institute in 1976, he and Scarr were spat upon by a phalanx of radical students, some of whom physically attacked the speakers and those who had invited him. Not only were Jensen’s lectures regularly broken up, he also received bomb threats, and he had to be put under constant guard.143 In March 1977, the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a forum in Washington, D.C., on research with recombinant DNA. As the first session began, protestors began marching down the aisles waving placards and charts.144 Hans Eysenck at a lecture to have been delivered at the London School of Economics was first prevented from speaking by the chanting of “No Free Speech for Fascists!” and then physically attacked and had to be rescued from the stage, his eyeglasses broken and blood streaming from his face.

When his book The IQ Argument appeared in the United States, wholesalers and booksellers were threatened with arson and violence, and the book became almost impossible to obtain.145 The above scenes, and many others like them, were triggered by assertions of mean IQs differing between racial groups, specifically between whites and blacks. No one seemed to notice that the issue was essentially irrelevant to the cause of a universalist eugenics advocated for all groups, without exception.

The second chief factor in the suppression of eugenics was the launching of the Holocaust memorial movement subsequent to the 1967 Arab/Israeli war. So effective was the campaign that polls show that many more Americans can identify the Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan.146 Those who are familiar with the term “eugenics” now associate it with “Holocaust” and “racism.” The general public is totally unaware that on September 16, 1939, the leaders of the eugenics movement in the United States and England explicitly rejected the racist doctrines of the Nazi government (see Appendix 1), as did many German eugenicists.

An enormous, albeit fully understandable, confusion has taken place within the Jewish community, and this confusion is fraught with significance for Jews today. According to the National Jewish Population Survey, Jews in America entered into a precipitous decline in numbers in the decade 1990-2000, reflecting a pattern typical of high-IQ groups.147 Half of Jewish women aged 30-34 have no children, and nearly half of American Jews are 45 or older.148 This is literally a matter of survival.

Beginning in the early 1980s, publications on eugenics enjoyed a considerable upswing, including a huge number of articles in the published literature and later over the Internet, but even so the majority of these publications are still either hostile or, at best, guarded. One relatively recent example is William H. Tucker’s The Science and Politics of Racial Research (1994). While claiming to support freedom of scientific inquiry, Tucker dismisses “the trivial scientific value of IQ heritabilities,” maintains that scientific rights of research “might be qualified by the rights of others,” muses whether certain research topics should be pursued at all, advocates denying government funding to racial research, proposes applying the Nuremburg Code to researchers, states that the subjects of psychological research “can be wronged without being harmed” and that they should be informed of the nature of the research in case they find the results of the research unflattering. He goes on to quote the phrases “those miserable 15 IQ points” and “Are you using such gifts as you possess for or against the people?”149 Tucker can best be seen as a moderate in the egalitarian camp.

Missa and Susanne’s 1999 book De l’eugénisme d’État à l’eugénisme privé(From State Eugenics to Private Eugenics) is a collection of articles authored by a group of Belgian and French scholars and scientists, some of whom are hostile to eugenics while others are actually supportive. Even so, eugenics in various places is described as “utopian” and “unrealistic.” Its goals are “unachievable,” and it represents “a collection of false ideas” which are “contradictory” and “disproven by research.” The very mention of the term can call up “unconditional condemnation for a shameful practice.”

Other phrases include:

“opprobrium,”

“the horrors of classical eugenics,”

“the danger of a eugenic drift,”

“American charlatans,”

“a dangerous trend,”

“the threat of eugenics,”

“fear,”

“risk,”

“menace,”

“peril,”

“insidious,”

“rampant,”

“radical,”

“immoral,”

“elitist,”

“the demon of eugenics,”

“the temptation of eugenics,”

“the worrisome Trojan horse of eugenics,”

“the specter of eugenics,”

“Nazi atrocities,”

“gas chambers,”

“racism,”

“ethnic discrimination,”

“the slippery slope of eugenics,”

“detestable reputation,”

“barbaric,”

“fear,”

“warning,”

“fatal,”

“vigilant resistance to this tendency,”

“genetic discrimination,”

“sterilizations and lobotomies,”

“creeping determinism,”

“genetic reductionism,”

“reduces culture to nature,”

“the cult of the body,” “totalitarian,”

“utilitarian drift,”

“inhumane,”

“a mad idea,”

“materialist reductionism,”

“biologism,”

“geneticism,”

“existential or metaphysical horror,”

“vehement, categorical, and definitive condemnation,”

“universal and absolute condemnation,”

“absolutely evil,”

“worse than murder,”

“Thou shalt not clone!,”

“radical evil,”

“absolutely bad, absolutely contrary to good,”

“perversion,”

“intrinsically evil,”

“intrinsically and necessarily negative with regard to the autonomy of others,”

“instrumentalization and objectivization of others,”

“the genetic impoverishment of cloning.”150

The campaign has been remarkably effective in achieving its goals. In 1969, Eugenics Quarterly, successor to Eugenic News, was renamed the Annals of Human Genetics. The following year, shortly after the first isolation of a DNA fragment which constituted a single identifiable gene, the young scientists involved in the project decided they would not continue their work on DNA. The reason, they reported, was that such work would eventually be put to evil uses by the large corporations and governments that control science.151

Borrowing a phrase from the Soviet purges, egalitarians denounced eugenics as a “pseudo-science,” so that the American Eugenics Society was forced to change its name, in 1973, to the Society for the Study of Social Biology. In 1990, the College Board changed the name of the SAT from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Assessment Test. In 1996, it dropped the words altogether and declared that the initials no longer stood for anything whatsoever. The eugenicists themselves all ran for cover, reclassifying themselves as “population scientists,” “human geneticists,” “anthropologists,” “demographers,” and “genetic counselors.”

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Possible Abuse of Genetics

I am myself indifferent honest;
but yet I could accuse me of such things
that it were better my mother had not borne me.

Hamlet

Ultimately, the most serious argument militating against eugenics is its possible abuse. Unquestionably, the danger is real. It would not take much work to come up with a lengthy list of past abuses. The baby can always be drowned in the bath water. We as a species have much in our past for which we can now experience only shame.

We are just now deciphering the blueprints according to which we ourselves were constructed; we could make terrible mistakes. Or we could lose too much diversity. And as not very distant history teaches us, eugenics could be misused to justify the elimination of peoples judged “inferior” or simply hated for whatever reason. For that matter, who can possibly predict what new evils the fertile human brain is capable of in some unknown future? It is indeed frightening. Sophisticated egalitarians, who are not really egalitarians at all but simply concerned thinkers who fear the man in the street most of all, are right to experience misgivings.

The potential abuse of genetics is not limited to distorting the human genome. It is already possible to begin modifying animals to enhance their intelligence to allow them to perform tasks currently performed by people, or even to create animal-human hybrids.152 A ready market will always exist for cheap, low-skilled workers, so that this is a real danger. Currently people feel they have the right to regard their fellow travelers on this planet as objects of consumption, so that there is not even a discussion of this frightening prospect. But imagine the moral dilemma that would face us had to deal with animals whose abilities overlapped the lower range of the human population.

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Euthanasia

There is a close relationship between eugenics and the right-to-die movement. Both are philosophies of life which place value on the quality of life, not just on life per se. Whereas life expectancy in England lagged behind fecundity until about 1830,153 the average life span in modern industrial economies now extends decades beyond the fertility span.

A simple visit to a nursing home provides convincing proof that there is a huge population (about to double, thanks to the baby boomers) of helpless, despairing elderly who are literally undergoing torture, day after day, month after month, year after year. Anyone who denies this obvious fact has only to change places with them –not for years, but for a few hours –to realize the tragic reality of the situation of many of them.

As we entered the third millennium, the most popular way chosen by these victims to escape their torture was to blow their brains out –a path considerably more popular among elderly men (27.7 per 100,000) than women (1.9 per 100,000).154

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Religion

Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of propositions relating to the fixity of Sun and Earth you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the Earth to stand still and the Sun to change position.

Galileo
“The Dialogue”

There are eugenicists who believe in God, eugenicists who are agnostic, and eugenicists who are atheists. Religious belief claims to operate in a different dimension than does eugenics, although there have always been those who viewed knowledge as a replacement for religion. The Russian language, for example, amalgamates the intellectual and spiritual under a single term: dukhovnyi.

In one crucial aspect, however, the scientific study of human psychology is antithetical to religion. No matter what their ideologies or methods, scientists are all in hot pursuit of the holy grail of causality. This is, after all, what science is all about.

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Population Management

There are two basic views of humankind:

a) that we have been created in the image of God and thus are so perfect that any improvement is unthinkable

b) that, while our species possesses great positive features as well as negative, enhancement is essential, and –at the very least –prevention of genetic decline is an absolute moral imperative

In many ways eugenics prescribes for humankind the same goals as for non-human species: a healthy population probably limited in size so as not to upset nature’s intricate balance of species and environment. Nevertheless, the specifics of human population administration are not identical either in goals or methodology to non-human population management techniques.

A “drain the pond and restock” methodology is not only morally objectionable with regard to people, its feasibility is also questionable. Blatantly coercive measures can even be counter-productive when they engender resistance to eugenic reform. For eugenics as a movement to escape the temptation of utopian fantasy, it must be oriented toward the realistically achievable.

In dealing with non-domesticated animal populations, simple viability is the goal, health being defined as the capability to survive and reproduce within an environment. By contrast, human health criteria also include intelligence and altruism. As for methodology, only relative minor impingements on the wellbeing of the current human population can be tolerated, since it they and only they who can implement eugenic reform. For example, whereas wildlife managers take for granted that a balance between prey and predators is a “healthy” thing, no such Spencerian “survival of the fittest” is appropriate for humans. Despite the grand continuity of belief retained by modern eugenics from the earlier tradition, on this point realistic modern eugenics departs radically from that preached a hundred years ago.

Although individual eugenic efforts are already in full swing, they are submerged in the great demographic currents, and thus global eugenic reform is a task for society as a whole. The strength of the government relative to that of the governed population determines the limits to governmental intervention (and abuse). The weaker the government, the smaller the potential for rational population management. There is also a role to be played by non-governmental organizations, whose freedom can be less fettered than that of governments. History is replete with instances of forced population management, the most infamous method of which is genocide. But other compulsory methods have also been employed. For example, the government of Indira Ghandi implemented a policy of compulsory sterilizations and vasectomies.

And, although India ultimately came to reject this policy, the nation’s current population is many millions smaller than it would have been without it. Nevertheless, China’s semi compulsory one-child policy has proven far more efficacious, and India with a Total Fertility Rate of 3.1 will soon surpass China (TFR: 1.7) as the world’s most populous nation. It is estimated that by 2000 the Chinese population was already a quarter billion less than it would have been without the one-child policy. On the other hand, there are situations where emergency methods may well present the only means of averting major catastrophe. Bangladesh and Haiti come to mind, but the political will even to raise the topic is totally absent. Global society is living a fatal lie.

Shifting our focus from quantitative to qualitative questions, the debate over voluntary versus compulsory methods has thus far amounted largely to pandering to the whims of current generations. Indeed, the very phrase “reproductive rights” itself represents a bias. Do people have the “right”to give birth to babies who in all probability will grow up feeble minded or who are likely to suffer from devastating genetic illnesses? On the one side of the equation may be a single person with a genetic IQ so low that simply coping in society is well nigh impossible and, on the other, the millions of disadvantaged offspring whom he and/or she may ultimately engender over the generations.

Forced sterilizations of persons with genetically predetermined low IQ and major genetic illnesses should be reinstituted. This is an unpopular statement, but it has to be said. Our current refusal to take into account the right of future generations to health and intelligence is a cowardly betrayal of our own children. Can it be that we are so selfish as to want to breed a genetically disadvantaged class of servants to perform our menial tasks for us?

The grand demographic trend is toward below replacement fertility rates, and while compulsion has its place, the good news is that energetic voluntary measures ought usually to be sufficient to permit women of reproductive age to realize their goal of smaller families. Clearly, voluntary methods are generally preferable to compulsory, although the line between voluntarism and coercion can often be vague.

One voluntary method involves the use of ultrasound to determine the sex of the fetus. In developing countries the desire for a male offspring is often strong enough to induce parents to abort females. Ultimately the number of males in a population is reproductively insignificant, since only females can bear children, and a tiny male population is capable of impregnating a huge female population. Thus, population management has to be female-oriented.

The Chinese infant sex ratio was normal in the 1960s and 1970s (roughly 106 boys for every 100 girls), but when the one-child policy was introduced in the 1980s, the figure became far more skewed in favor of boys; by 2002 China’s fifth national census revealed a sex ratio at birth of approximately 116.86 males per 100 females, having increased to 108.5 in 1982 and 110.9 in 1987. (Admittedly, there is also a question of underreporting of female births on the part of couples eager to receive permission to have another child in the hope that it will be a son.) As early as 2000 the number of men in China was already estimated to exceed that of women by sixty million.

The situation is much the same in India, where the 1991 census indicated approximately 35-45 million missing women, when ultrasound was far less available than it is now. In a ten-year study of babies born in Delhi hospitals in the period 1993-2003, the number of female births was 542 per 1,000 boys if the first child was a girl. If the first two children were girls, the ratio was only 219-1,000. Unfortunately, although the desire for sons is greatest among rural populations, high-IQ families possess greater access to modern medicine, including ultrasound, so that this practice appears to have been dysgenic thus far. But made easily available to low-IQ families, or if such families were even financially rewarded, it could become strongly eugenic in nature, simultaneously attacking both quantitative and qualitative demographic problems. (The historic link between eugenics and Malthusian thought should be emphasized.)

A sea change is already underway; by 2005 many clinics offered ultrasound for as little as 500 rupees ($11.50). It goes without saying that this is a tragic turn of events for those men who do not find a mate for themselves, but it is a far lesser evil than dysgenic overpopulation. Moreover, heightened competition for females would disproportionately reward high-IQ males.

(For this same reason polygamy should be universally decriminalized. The legal enforcement of monogamy is a dysgenic intrusion into personal freedom. No scientific breeder would even consider it.)

Another voluntary method is a vigorous promotion of contraceptive methods among low-IQ families. While education is not about to cancel out the sex drive of young people, it can go a long way toward reducing the birth rate. Reversible sterilization should be actively promoted.

The current debate between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” fails utterly to take into account the consequences of abortion for genetic selection. Abortion should be actively promoted, since it often serves as the last and even only resort for many low-IQ mothers who fail to practice contraception. Welfare policies need to be radically reexamined. Rather than simply pay low-IQ women more for each child, financial support should be made dependent on consent to undergo sterilization. Society should put more emphasis on greater tax credits for families with children, nurseries, day-care centers, etc.

This would promote fertility among high-IQ women, who otherwise are tempted either not to have children at all, or to have too few, sacrificing their unborn children before the altar of career advancement. The goals of the feminist movement are in and of themselves legitimate and fair, but wed to the anti-scientific worldview of radical egalitarianism, they will devastate our species.

Eugenic family planning services are the greatest gift that the advanced countries can offer the Third World. In a global society, parochial fixation on any one country is a pathology that human society can ill afford. What is needed is tough love. Such a policy would promote the interests of any ethnic group, all of which suffer when their least intelligent members serve as the breeding pool while the most intelligent encounter strong disincentives to fertility.

In different countries a different mix of governmental and non-governmental activism is appropriate. Useful measures would include paying low-IQ women to accept embryo transfer. Sperm banks need to be encouraged to attach the greatest importance to intelligence, and the promotion of these institutions should be covered out of tax monies. And the technology should be developed to create an artificial womb or, alternatively, make inter-species embryo transplants a reality, rapidly increasing the number of high-IQ individuals. Religious belief will always be with us, and eugenics must not be presented as scientific in an anti-religious sense.

At the same time there is a huge potential for excess if eugenics were to become a core belief of the masses. Genetic research needs to be promoted without regard to cost. Who can say what enormous potential awaits us in the future as a result of germ-line intervention? On the immigration front, the importation of low-IQ groups to perform unskilled labor at low wages must be recognized as a threat to the host population’s long-term viability. Panmixia also represents a loss in genetic diversity. All populations represent unique entities, and the loss of such uniqueness is everyone’s loss. Nevertheless, given the realities of improved transportation and communication, inbreeding can only increase in the future.

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Feasibility

Nature has packed away this long brain
Like a sword into scabbard.
She has forgotten those whose grave is green, Whose breath is red, whose laugh is supple.

Osip Mandelstam
“Lamarck”

When an ideal is recognized as unachievable, it is dismissed as “utopian.” If real sacrifice is required on the part of the currently living, whose altruism extends downward for only a generation or two and who for the most part are indifferent to culture and civilization, is eugenics not simply a fantasy?

To evaluate the feasibility of reestablishing the eugenics movement as a viable social force, we must first take a hard look at political systems and move beyond the populist jingoism which is as eternal as it is ubiquitous. In a dictatorship, power is patently invested in one person, whereas in “democracies” the pyramidal power structure is more opaque:

Level A: lobbies and (largely anonymous) oligarchs.
Level B: politicians.
Level C: prominent government staffers and media.
Level D: the general population.

What is crucial in this scheme of things is that the relationship of Levels B and C to Level A is, to a significant degree, that of employee to employer. To be elected, politicians need money for polling and advertising/propaganda, while the media (also owned by Level A) entertain the general population with competitions in which the differences between the competitors is minimal. Once “elected,” politicians then implement the will of those who provided the financing, while losing politicians are “parked” in profitable ceremonial positions to ready themselves for the next round. To be sure, there are sophisticates within the general population who are not duped as to the nature of the system, but they can be intimidated, co-opted, or even permitted to voice discontent. Since they pose no threat to the system, their protests are used as a demonstration of “freedom of speech.” The bottom line is that all human social structures are oligarchic in nature, and the implementation of a viable eugenics policy is dependent on a relatively tiny elite.

Eugenics is not an either/or proposition. Many of the decisions being taken on a governmental level are already fraught with genetic consequences – family planning programs, legalized and subsidized abortions, immigration criteria, tax credits for having children, mandated paid parental leave, genetic research, cloning, fertility assistance, and so on. Eugenicists argue that it is only reasonable that the decision makers take into account the eugenic or dysgenic consequences of governmental actions.

The world is divided into independent nations. Given the necessary funding, it would be possible in at least some of them to set up massive positive-eugenic breeding programs which would not necessarily depend on human birth mothers. The resistance to such changes is understandably intense, considering that even artificial insemination continues to be resisted in some quarters.

One obvious factor that will promote the eugenic agenda is the undeniable desire of parents to have healthy, intelligent children. Genetic screening of embryos will obviously encompass a greater and greater range of detectable traits, and thus the bar will be raised from simply eliminating disastrous diseases to attempting to produce children who enjoy genetic advantages that are currently available to a smaller percentage of the population. Germ-line therapy, unlike both the traditional methods of positive and negative eugenics, will make it possible for people to have their own children –but children who will be more healthy and intelligent than they would have been without genetic intervention. This method will entirely bypass the intergenerational conflict of interests which works to the disadvantage of the helpless unborn. As discussed above, public opinion is extremely malleable.

Advertising and political propaganda come down to cost. But if any individual country were to aggressively pursue a national eugenics policy while being militarily weak, of if any ethnic group were to follow such a course of action, nonparticipating countries/groups would sense a competitive threat to their offspring and would be sorely tempted to launch a preemptive strike so as to avoid the necessity of introducing a eugenics policy themselves.

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Radical Intervention

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

Hamlet

While we are still at an extremely early stage in our understanding of human genetics, it is entirely foreseeable that future knowledge will permit us to go beyond simple genetic tinkering to replace this or that disease-engendering gene or enhance some desirable ability or personality trait. We will be able to go much further and alter the genetic constitution in the most radical fashion. As pointed out by the bioethicist and theologian Joseph Fletcher as early as 1973, the creation of persons whose genome is partly borrowed from other species is entirely possible.155

Recent writing now discusses the “fungibility” of DNA, the consequent malleability of life, the fact that human nature is not fixed, the possibility that at some future point different groups of human beings may follow divergent paths of development through the use of genetic technology –perhaps as different from one another as men and women are now, the collapse of interspecies barriers, the possibility of not simply discovering genes but creating them. Should we really attempt to preserve human nature or should we attempt to change it?156 John H. Campbell, a biologist at the University of California, is among those who advocate radical interventionism.
He writes that

Geneticists are laying open our heredity like the circuit board of a radio…. We shall be able to redesign our biological selves at will…. In point of fact, it is hard to imagine how a system of inheritance could be more ideal for engineering than ours is.157 Reasoning that the majority of humankind will not voluntarily accept qualitative population-management policies, Campbell points out that any attempt to raise the IQ of the whole human race would be tediously slow. He further points out that the general thrust of early eugenics was not so much species improvement as the prevention of decline.

Campbell’s eugenics, therefore, advocates the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a “relic” or “living fossil” and the application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the genome, probably writing novel genes from scratch using a DNA synthesizer. Such eugenics would be practiced by elite groups, whose achievements would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten generation the new groups will have advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we transcend apes.

Campbell anticipates the creation of new species according to the punctuated equilibrium scenario discussed earlier. Practitioners of the new eugenics would view themselves as intermediaries of evolution rather than as finished products. Freed from the “drag” of an outdated species that is already in decline, they could evolve in intelligence in a geometrical increase –forever. Our current intellect, Campbell projects, is probably unable even to comprehend the mental attributes that descendants will struggle to conceive. He then goes on to advocate an old idea –eugenic religions. Not accidentally, one of the sites circulating Campbell’s article is that of “Prometheism.” Lastly, he points out that some appropriate genetic technologies are already available:

Private autoevolution is not a possibility for a distant future nor is it a science fiction. It is with us now, albeit at an early enough phase to have escaped most people’s attention…. The most significant legacy of our age will not be nuclear power, computers, political achievements or a static ethics for a “sustainable” society. It will be the closure of our rational intellect around our evolution. The statues of the 21st century will celebrate the fathers of Homo autocatalyticus who brought evolution under its own reason. The world waits to see whose faces will adorn them. 158

Campbell’s projection of rapid, small-group-directed evolution is at once heartening and depressing. Greater, even open-ended, intelligence is awesome to contemplate. On the other hand, how sad we must be for those “living fossils” who constitute the mass of humanity –humanity, at least, as we know it today.

The reader will recall that eugenics does not limit itself to the present population but defines society as the entire human community over time; the movement perceives itself as the fourth leg of the table upon which that community rests. (The three other legs are a supply of natural resources; a clean, biodiverse environment; and a human population no larger than the planet can comfortably sustain on an indefinite basis.) This means that we are dealing with what eugenicists consider to be non-negotiable issues. Such conditions are viewed as either essential to survival or intrinsically linked to the very meaning of existence. All other considerations –political parties, for example, or even the welfare of today’s population –are perceived as flowing from and subordinate to these two.

What this means is that if the eugenics platform is to have any chance of success it will have to adopt a posture of non-partisanship and link itself to neither the political right nor the left. At the same time, for strategic considerations, the movement cannot afford embroilment in inter-group conflict or even inter-group comparisons. While these areas may constitute legitimate concerns for the political scientist, the sociologist, or the human biologist, history has demonstrated that their pursuit within the eugenic agenda can be counterproductive and even disastrous. Scholars and scientists wishing to promote the eugenics agenda will have to search for commonalities with other thinkers rather than enter into conflict with them. Ideological separation will require a self-discipline that no one will readily embrace. To be honest, some of these topics can be of eugenic significance. At the very least, they can intersect with eugenic considerations. Presently, such self-control is not even being attempted. A post-human or even a non-human evolutionary path to intelligence –as opposed to a general uplifting of the whole population –therefore appears more and more likely.

Legal barriers are already being erected in a frantic attempt to prevent a resurgence of eugenics, but to believe that such measures can be completely effective is a hopeless fantasy. Campbell’s logic is inescapable. The rejection of traditional within-species eugenics –despite all the posturing of society –will inevitably lead to the scenario he describes. The invention of writing created a global human mind, in which knowledge is passed on and accumulated over generations. In the process, individual people specialize in specific fields, and no one today would be tempted to speak of “universal geniuses.” There is simply too much to know. While the human brain has been millions of years in the making, computers, which have been in development really for only about a century, are already beating the best human players at chess. “Hal” may not yet have been born but he is even now kicking in his binary womb.

Carbon-based technology has its limitations. The individual human brain is limited by its size, by the amount of time available for learning, and by the speed at which it can process information. A computer can be created of any size with limitless memory and limitless programming. As for speed, current technology is already processing information in picoseconds (trillionths of a second), whereas the human brain is capable of mere microseconds.159 The human mind is itself a machine, and its quirks, self-consciousness, and adaptability will all eventually be explained, even though we are only beginning to unlock its secrets. Currently a noisy debate is ongoing as to whether computer brain power can surpass human, but really it is a question of when rather than whether. The two societies projected by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine, one producing material goods and the other, childlike, consuming them, is probably going to arrive sooner than we think and the childlike creatures will be us.

This soon-to-be reality relegates to eugenics a far more modest role than would otherwise be imaginable. Any effort to improve the human brain is targeted at an instrument which is inherently limited in its capacity. The machine brain, on the other hand, will be something like God. Allotted only a thousand months or so of existence, we individuals are as ephemeral as chaff in the wind, but the fate of thought, of culture, of life itself has been thrust upon us, and we can either fritter away the patrimony of millions of generations in the gratification of individualistic and tribal instincts or we can stride forward to fulfill our fate, shouldering our responsibilities to a future world and linking hands in the great chain of generations.

Conclusion

A father’s responsibility
Deuteronomy 6:1-9

As the collective human brain ponders both its own origins and its future, the eugenics platform reemerges as timeless, for the issues it deals with are independent of both historical advocacy and repudiation by individuals.

The left-right political continuum has been set according to issues of importance to currently living constituencies, whose interests are largely peripheral and even instrumental to the eugenics platform, where neither the expanded (longitudinal) definition of humankind nor the teleology of existence fit into the accepted spectrum.

The conflict of interests between us and future generations represents a moral confrontation, but politics can best be summarized as the formation of alliances based on mutual advantage. Which are the constituencies that will agree to partner with future generations when no quid pro quo is possible? Do such constituencies even exist?

What You Can Do For Future Generations

1. Tell your friends about this book and forward to them the website at which the book can be downloaded free of charge: www.whatwemaybe.org
2. If you are a native speaker of a language other than English and wish to volunteer to translate this book into your native tongue, please contact Dr. Glad at: JohnPGlad@Yahoo.com
3. If you are a teacher dealing with any of the following areas, assign the book to your students: academic freedom, anthropology, bioethics, biology, biopolitics, cloning, crime, demographics, ecology, egalitarianism, environmentalism, ethics, eugenics, euthanasia, evolution, fertility, futurology, generational equity, genetics, history, the holocaust, human rights, migration/emigration,/immigration), philosophy, political science, population studies, religion, sociobiology, sociology, testing, welfare.

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