"Eugenics, Yet"
by Fred Reed
"It is curious. Eugenics, meaning approximately the control of breeding to produce desired traits was once a popular idea, espoused by Charles Darwin, as well as such illustrious liberals as H. G. Wells and George bernard Shaw, a raft of feminists including Margaret Sanger, and countless officials from Churchill to Gandhi. The field is now in very bad odor. Why, precisely?
Eugenics is of course routinely practiced today in various forms. For example, students at CalTech are chosen for very high intelligence and, when they marry, doubtless hope for and expect intelligent children. Eugenics. When a woman patronizing a sperm bank asks for an intelligent and healthy donor, she is practicing eugenics. In many jurisdictions, prenatal screening detects various defects which are then aborted. Eugenics.
The place of genetics in public policy is fraught, to put it mildly. An observation often made is that modern medicine keeps alive to reproductive age people with genetic defects that would in earlier times have killed them in childhood. These are many, running from anaphylactic shock and death from allergies to Down’s syndrome to diabetes to Celiac disease and Tay-Sachs. Since these are no longer eliminated from the gene pool, they become progressively more common.
Not good, but what to do about it? Detect these in utero and abort them? Tell a bright and otherwise normal young woman that she cannot have children because they might have Celiac’s? (This would include one of my daughters, so I am not wildly enthusiastic.)
A common thread in the thinking of the many often-leftish proponents of eugenics was that various forms of public assistance encouraged prolific breeding by people of low intelligence and other genetic defects. The result would be an increasing load of imbeciles and approximations thereunto, constituting a burden on society. This thought, today almost meriting a death sentence, was once widely accepted. Biologically speaking, it was correct. But what, if anything, to do about it?
Most crime is committed by young men of low intelligence and poor impulse control, the two being closely associated, and such men are seldom employable in a technological society. This is easily demonstrated. But what to do about it? As their numbers increase, the problem worsens. What to do about it? Keep building more jails?
Another observation is that the more intelligent people are, the fewer children they have. There seem to be several reasons for this. Previously all women, including the very bright, were expected to stay in the house and to have and care for children. Dull-witted women couldn’t imagine doing anything else, and the bright had no choice. Today smart women can become biochemists or lawyers or pretty much anything else, and often find these more interesting than changing diapers. Anyone moving in the professional classes of, say, Washington, will know very bright women either unmarried or childless by choice.
The result of low fecundity among the smart and exuberant reproduction by the dim is, at least according to those who study these things, a slow diminution of the national mean IQ. Or maybe not so slow.
This observation will be furiously attacked by the woke, presumably innocent of high-school biology. The politics of the day holds that if you pretend a problem doesn’t exist, it won’t. In a deeply anti-intellectual America steeped in resentment of superiority and rapid endumbment of the schools and the entire culture, nothing can be discussed that might unsettle the mob. The consequences are going to be fascinating.
Yet it is interesting to consider policies offered by the advocates of eugenics. These will be shocking to the modern mind, such as it is. But remember that in former times things could be discussed that today are verboten.
One approach, widely practiced both in America and Europe, was compulsory sterilization of what were called idiots, moron, or imbeciles. This was not then regarded as just-like-Hitler, and seemed to many good-hearted people as preferable to having such defectives living miserably at public expense. Recently I have seen it said that we should not eliminate Down’s syndrome because those suffering from it were a desirable form of societal diversity.
Another suggestion was to offer to pay the hopelessly dull to undergo voluntary sterilization. I don’t know whether this was ever done. Given that such people cannot raise children, this might be the best available idea.
At the other end of the scale, paying the intelligent to reproduce was thought a good idea. This had the advantage that it did not compel anyone to do anything. Nor was it impractical. If couples of mean IQ 150 were offered a thousand dollars a month per child with a guarantee of having the university expense of the resulting rugrats paid, many might go for it. At the 150 level takers would be few enough and the payoff arguably high enough in gifted Americans that the expense would be worth it. Regression toward the mean, yes, but keeping good genes in the pool matters. Or would if we did it.
To me it is interesting that so many major figures favored eugenics and supported its compulsory application. Yet oddly, at least by today’s standards, many conservatives were against eugenics, as for example Chesterton, often on religious grounds. But it was widely accepted that the good to society justified the inconvenience to the retarded.
Well and good, and interesting. However it is obvious that nothing will be done that smacks of eugenics, at least as regards intelligence, impulse control, and criminality. But genetic diseases? In the case of things like hemophilia, Tay-Sachs, and cystic fibrosis, in utero screening is done. But should we end up aborting fetuses for every detectable anomaly? A gluten allergy for example? In a society in which a fair few favor partial-birth abortion, what if a defect is noticed three minutes after birth? Slippery slopes and such.
Crime and welfare dependency are another matter. The link between crime and low intelligence is well established with its concomitant of poor awareness of the future, and poor impulse control. People of low IQ can seldom read and make poor employees. Pockets of this sort of thing exist in the slums of London and did, maybe still do, in the back hollers of West Virginia and are rampant in American cities.
What to do? Would it make sense to encourage the most intelligent in the urban underclass to have children while discouraging the retarded? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter as nothing will be done. We will on average become less intelligent, less healthy, and more criminal. Whoopee."
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