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Dares not speak its name
Apr. 3rd, 2019 12:21 pmScott Alexander says that 40% of the population favors eugenics, but no one dares to be the first one to speak up for it. If so, I think that’s a good thing.
It seems that eugenics is like what Jubal Harshaw said about cannibalism: It’s not that we have a taboo against it because we’re civilized; we need one because we’re not. 100 years ago we had a program that was called eugenics. Like so much of American history, it was really about racism.
Lothrop Stoddard, in The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, started out by saying that they were just trying to make humanity stronger and smarter and it just happened that WASPs had those traits. By the end of the book he was admitting that some of the dark-skinned and/or hook-nosed people seemed to have abilities, but they had unspecified genetic taints and shouldn’t be allowed to breed anyway. It was all like that, and many people suffered.
Look around you and tell me it would be any better today.
It seems that eugenics is like what Jubal Harshaw said about cannibalism: It’s not that we have a taboo against it because we’re civilized; we need one because we’re not. 100 years ago we had a program that was called eugenics. Like so much of American history, it was really about racism.
Lothrop Stoddard, in The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, started out by saying that they were just trying to make humanity stronger and smarter and it just happened that WASPs had those traits. By the end of the book he was admitting that some of the dark-skinned and/or hook-nosed people seemed to have abilities, but they had unspecified genetic taints and shouldn’t be allowed to breed anyway. It was all like that, and many people suffered.
Look around you and tell me it would be any better today.
