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Monday, August 5. 2013

Dalymple on eugenics

From Destiny of Crime:



 Eugenics, I suspect, was in reality a symptom of a growing impatience of intellectuals with the intractability of the human condition, with the fact that that Man was irredeemably imperfect. And this impatience grew because of a decline in the religious understanding of life (it was no coincidence that Chesterton, who saw so easily through the pretensions of eugenics, should have been firmly Christian, while none of his opponents was). In the 1920s sterilization of the unfit would do for humanity what psychopharmacology is now supposed to do: render it happy because perfect. No one with an understanding of Original Sin could believe such a thing – even if Original Sin is not based upon an actual historical truth.


Posted by The Barrister in Politics at 13:40 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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I'm not at all sure I agree with the good doctor on this.

My first reading on the topic was an essay by Aldous Huxley arguing for some sort of eugenics. His main point was that modern living was no longer ensure JUST the survival of the fittest, but survival of just about everyone, fit and unfit. No doubt his brother, Julian Huxley, the biologist influenced him greatly.

In nature, one tail of the bell curve is continually truncated as the marginal and the losers (mostly men but some women too, through unsuccessful maternal behaviors) never got a change to reproduce. In our civilized world, just about anyone can reproduce and see their progeny to maturity, thanks to welfare, medical advances, and supportive charity.

In agrarian societies, genetic research shows that a LOT of men were barren branches with no progeny.

I think the movie [i]Idiotacracy[i] has this as an underlying premise.

The political problem is, which men are smart enough to replace the workings of evolution?
#1 Whitehall on 2013-08-05 21:06 (Reply)

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