Eugenics in America; war on the weak

Politics generally amounts to the horizontal struggle between organized groups and wealthy individuals in the pursuit of their real or perceived interests. By contrast, eugenics represents a vertical effort – lobbying for the genetic patrimony of future generations. Unaccustomed to protests on behalf of this as yet nonexistent group, those of us who are currently breathing generally find it more comforting to proceed from an assumption of human particularism. Philosopher David Heyd of the Hebrew University writes of the purported “rift between the human and the natural”: while animals are viewed as being instinct driven in a positivist sense, people lay claim to reason and ‘free will.’ But once the recognition is made of the continuity of humanity with other species, it becomes more and more difficult to “characterize humans in contradistinction to other animals,” to use Heyd’s phraseology. That continuity in its turn rests on the recognition of causality, as opposed to intervention by deity. Based as it is on a theory of human particularism, the “software heresy” of egalitarianism must be able to stand up to the piercing gaze of scientific observation and thus is doomed to at least partial failure, but at what point exactly does the half full glass suddenly become half empty? The twentieth century can be divided into thirds: the first third being one of eugenic utopian thought, the second one of reassessment, with the last third dominated by an anti-hereditarian utopianism. Eugenicists believe that since we now understand the mechanism of evolution and know that human beings are a biological species, the road to perfection is clearly laid out along the lines of scientific selection. In this sense, eugenicists are entirely accurate in their appraisal of humankind, but unrealistic in their assumption that humans are rational and altruistic enough to implement this knowledge for the good of distant ‘future generations.’ By contrast, even those egalitarians (anti-hereditarians) who accept Darwinism assume that evolution has produced only insignificant variance within and between human populations, and evolution has come to a grinding halt for human beings. Thus, utopia is to be found at the end of an environmentally determined rainbow. Essentially, anti-hereditarian egalitarianism is secular religion: if we have been created in the image of God, we are divine too. But ultimately the number of frail links in a chain is meaningless. It snaps whether they are one or many. The current popular assumption is that the normal rules of animal husbandry and population management have little applicability to people. In 1968 Soviet academician Nikolai Dubinin displayed no reticence in