Eugenics

The Big Questions: Eugenics and Ethno-States

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Every year Edge.org gets some certifiably smart people to give answers to a Big Question. This year’s Big Question is “What should we be worried about?” I suppose if I was invited to comment, it would be about the decline of Whites in all societies that have been historically White, from Australia to Europe, and what that might mean in terms of future racial/ethnic conflict as multiculturalism continues to march forward unimpeded.

But none of these smart people are concerned about that. Nevertheless, there are a couple of comments that bear on these issues. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and NYU, discusses Chinese eugenics as a long term threat to the West. In the West, as John Glad has shown, eugenics was a casualty of World War II and the successful effort by Jewish intellectual activists linking eugenics with the Holocaust. Eugenics is alive and well in Israel and China, but any mention of eugenics is greeted by the West with moral panic. Miller notes that “With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects.”

In the early part of the 20th century, eugenics based on Darwinism was common knowledge, and there were concerns about the future of the race, but among Europeans like Madison Grant and the Chinese:

Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and “the science of deformed fetuses” (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China’s rightful place as the world’s leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. Read more

Review of John Glad’s “Jewish Eugenics”

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Jewish Eugenics, by John Glad. Washington, DC: Wooden Shore Publishers, 2011; 464pp. (Downloadable at either www.whatwemaybe or www.woodenshore.org. These sites also have Glad’s Future Human Evolution.)

John Glad begins Jewish Eugenics by noting that “much of what might be termed  ‘accepted eugenics narrative’ is in crass discordance with the historical facts” (p. 8). In other words, we are about to enter one of those academic minefields where “truth” is rigorously cleansed to make sure it is compatible with ethnic interests. Indeed, “writing books about Jews used to be a far easier undertaking than it is today, with Jewish anxieties over ‘anti-Semitism’ having been so elevated as to render dispassionate scholarly discourse nearly impossible” (p. 8).

I am not so sure that dispassionate scholarship is impossible, but it is surely the case that findings that diverge from the self-image desired by any ethnic group will surely be vigorously contested by academic activists or, more probably, consigned to oblivion. Dr. Glad assures me that in his case, it is the latter, writing of his frustration at the silence that has greeted his work. Welcome to the club.

As a university professor, Glad is quite attuned to the politics of having a good career. Critics of eugenics, like the notorious Ashley Montagu (a disciple of Franz Boas), get fat honoraria for delivering superficial, factually challenged lectures sponsored by numerous academic departments and programs. (Glad characterizes a lecture by Montagu as “an impressive demonstration of indoctrination” [p. 91].) On the other hand, those who defend eugenics “are subjected to academic shunning” (p. 91), their books are not used in classes and not purchased by academic libraries. They get no invitations to attend conferences or deliver lectures. Read more