Tommy Douglas — the father of socialized medicine in Canada and one of the country’s most beloved figures, and became premier of Saskatchewan province — once supported eugenic policies. In 1933, he received a Master of Arts in sociology from McMaster University for his thesis, “The Problems of the Subnormal Family.” In the thesis, Douglas recommended several eugenic policies, including the sterilization of “mental defectives and those incurably diseased.” True he later rejected this belief (but didn't give back his graduate degree), but who knows how much damage his thoughts and beliefs caused while he held them. Even today his political party, the NDP, are just fine with the downward slide of Canada's assisted suicide practices rather than actually helping people.
Tommy's weakness was his gullibility for things pronounced as 'scientific' by academia. Instead of seeing that this is just another business swindle promoted by self-serving capitalist racketeers. He should have known well that no sector is somehow above being corrupted by the regime.
In just the same way have the "Left", especially the NDP fallen all over themselves to sign onto the Covid horse shit. And so the lockdowns of the working class and cancelling of free speech. So, they are historical toast. They are now the class enemy.
> The logo of the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921, pictured above, declared that “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution,” with the goal being “an harmonious entity.”
Treating H as a vowel. That right there should be enough to discredit them.
Serious question, though: Because of its connection with Nazism, eugenics is commonly treated today as a discredited theory that no one would take seriously. At the same time, Jewish populations (the most remarked-upon victims of Nazism) have all but eradicated Tay-Sachs disease by the use of genetic databases to restrict marriage and guide breeding along desired lines. Is there any valid reason (and "it's distasteful" is not a valid reason) to call this something other than eugenics?
(2) And I recently wrote a piece explaining why there IS a valid reason to avoid calling such programs "eugenics." Briefly, "eugenics" is a hopelessly spoiled brand name for an amorphous collection of concepts, many of which were intellectually incoherent and morally toxic. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/no-im-not-a-eugenicist. After I wrote that, a philosopher asked, if not "eugenics," then what we should use as an umbrella term for genetic screening, bans on sibling marriage, embryo selection, gene therapy, etc. I suggested calling those things "genetic screening," "bans on sibling marriage," "embryo selection," "gene therapy," etc. I said a problem with eugenics was its breadth and lack of definable borders. The umbrella term made it vulnerable to mission creep, motte-and-bailey ploys, and worse.
Well I’m no scholar of eugenics, but it seems like it used to be that eugenics consisted primarily of eliminating undesirables to improve the gene pools and attempts at chemical experiments to find the physiologies to improve performance and longevity. Now it’s “evolved” to vaccinating the proles with ostensible intent of mitigating potential negative health outcomes (or maybe causing more health issues create easily controlled wards of the state?) and transhumanism for the elites to enhance their power and extend their lives. The next phase in the evolution of feudalism. Check out the comments of Yuval Harari.
Transhumanism is not just for the "elites" any more than humanism is/was. It's the idea that it is possible and desirable to use technology to improve the human condition. Note that most transhumanists endorse the principle of "morphological freedom" according to which you own your body and have the right to decide what changes, if any, to make. The government has no right to make you do anything with your body. (The recent "technoprogressive" offshoot is far more friendly to government but they don't represent transhumanism.)
Thanks! I worked with a fellow a while back who introduced me to transhumanism. So, yes, I read about some of those internal debates. Interesting food for thought and discussion. I just subscribed to your feed and will read it with interest.
It seems to me that the unmentioned (directly) common denominator underlying the overall approach to our society by the "progressives" of both the past and present is the desire for command and control by an authoritarian government. The desire to rule us remains the paramount driver of the left, whether it be climate hysteria, Covid policy, economic regulation, etc. It is revealed by the open admission of its most vocal advocates to not let a crisis (ie: any negative occurrence) to go to waste.
Always hearing that eugenics has been 'discredited,' but never given real examples. Yes, you hear about the difficulties in eliminating recessive alleles, or mention of pleiotropy, complex traits, etc. But never is it explained why these arguments apply to eugenics but not to natural selection. No concrete explanations are ever given. Instead, discussion always seems to devolve into "who can decide what is a positive/negative trait" rhetoric.
The claim that eugenicists are "intolerant of dissent" is a new one. Hard to reconcile with the fact that eugenic advocates are now an invisibly small minority. Any examples of this 'intolerance' and how it's applied? Or is 'eugenics' here being employed as a sort of pejorative against a broader and ill-defined group of people concerned with human welfare? People who would no doubt never refer to themselves as 'eugenicists'?
DISCREDITED: The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939 because its data collection techniques were garbage. Buck v Bell presumed that Carrie Buck was genetically deficient because (a) her mother may have been a prostitute, (b) Carrie became pregnant as the result of a rape, (c) a random social worker said there was “something peculiar” about her six-month-old infant. In North Carolina, Wallace Kuralt had African American women sterilized because he just thought it was a helpful thing to do. Eugenicists were methodologically incompetent, prone in the extreme to confirmation bias, and about as scientific in their evaluation criteria as dog-show enthusiasts. And, of course, the Nazi extremes practically drove the word from common usage. You could fill tons of disk space with data on the many ways in which eugenics has been discredited on virtually every dimension.
INTOLERANT OF DISSENT: There is nothing new about that charge whatsoever. Eugenicists’ intolerance is well-document. As Thomas Leonard wrote in “Illiberal Reformers”: “Until the late 1920s, American geneticists supported eugenics or kept their reservations private while welcoming the funding and publicity eugenics generated. Herbert S. Jennings of Johns Hopkins University resigned from the American Eugenics Society in 1925, a year after writing to Irving Fisher that eugenics societies were no place for men of science. In 1927, his colleague Raymond Pearl, once a very active eugenicist, publicly repudiated eugenics in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, an apostasy that received national attention and caused the withdrawal of a job offer from Harvard.” There are numerous accounts of critics being shouted down and physically chased from scientific conferences for their apostasy.
My article does not refer to eugenicists today; you are correct in saying that people referring to themselves in 2022 as eugenicists are small in number. What I said was that “the eugenicists’ lack of skepticism and intolerance for dissent is very much with us in science and policy discussions today.” In other words, the sort of anti-skepticism and intolerance that eugenicists exhibited remains with us in various fields of science.
"You could fill tons of disk space with data on the many ways in which eugenics has been discredited on virtually every dimension."
But you've only given examples from a single dimension, namely how the concept was poorly employed (prior to a developed understanding of genetics). Bad practice does not demonstrate that the concept itself is flawed.
"There is nothing new about that charge whatsoever."
I was talking about the present, of course. But giving examples of two prominent eugenicists repudiating eugenics doesn't really indicate closed-mindedness. Certainly not more so than many other fields.
"...the sort of anti-skepticism and intolerance that eugenicists exhibited remains with us in various fields of science."
So it's not a type of anti-skepticism that originated from, nor is distinctive just to, eugenics.
Glad to respond. I’ll assure you that intolerance was endemic to eugenics, that it was especially potent when compared with other sciences, and that there are endless examples. But this is a blog, not a dissertation. Over time, I’ll present lots more. ... ... As much as anything, the purpose of these essays is to give a taste of a problem and encourage lots of people to take deeper dives on their own. ... ... A fundamental problem with eugenics was that feeble or nonexistent evidence was instantly turned into monstrous public policies that violated individual liberties in horrific ways. I have occasionally assigned Max Born’s “Experiment and Theory in Physics” to economics classes to show how even the hardest of the hard sciences--subatomic theory and cosmology--became politicized (in some cases, by the same people who were pushing eugenics). But the arbitrary assumptions about the age of the universe that Born described did not lead to the physicists involved to say, “AH! I think the universe is 10 billion years old, not 1 billion years old--therefore, I will surreptitiously rip the Fallopian tubes out of tens of thousands of 13-year-old girls without telling them I’m doing so.” Eugenics mattered at the individual level in ways that others sciences did not--and this also created a feedback loop making eugenic science even crappier than it otherwise might have been on its own.
So, wasn't the core problem with eugenics that it was combined with a coercive policy approach? What about voluntary eugenic approaches such as embryo selection, genetic engineering to eliminate diseases, etc.?
Two issues, at least. One is the fine boundary between voluntary and coercive. Eugenics was originally supposed to be voluntary but quickly transmogrified. Second is the topic of my article—whether the word “eugenics” is so stained by its sordid history of coercion, scientific dishonesty, suppression of dissent, crackpot political movements, and unparalleled barbarity that it is effectively unstable—that the word itself can never be separated from that garbage. I think the word is ruined in that manner and that, furthermore, it is so closely identified with coercion, quackery, and barbarity that trying to resurrect the word invites observers to reconsider the unsavory parts. By all means, talk about embryo selection, genetic engineering, etc. — but call those things something other than “eugenics.” There are any number of things that were rebranded after the word became tainted. In my view, it should remain an historical term. There is no compelling reason to resurrect it for contemporary use—and lots of compelling reasons not to resurrect it.
Sadly, I agree that the term "eugenics" carries too many really bad connotations that it has to be abandoned. I can't think of a different umbrella term to replace it. I'm still fighting to keep "capitalism" despite it having been abused to mean massive government intervention and subsidies.
Okay, I certainly agree that politics and ideology can corrupt any field, and that something like eugenics is especially at risk. Hopefully, you'll delve into Wokeness, and how it's corrupting science and public policy. After all, per your example, we have thousands of kids *presently* being sterilized...
Most "science" is just racketeering. Budget-boosting, career mongering monopolies cloaked in white coats for the chumps. If you offer enough money Nobel Laureates will swear the moon is made of green cheese. Covid is/was a deliberate fraud driven by the cowardice of professionals to speak out against certain repression.
The organic contiuity between the constituencies behind the KKK and 'respectable' eugenics are clear for those who will see. Civil War era academic "Niggerology". The head of the Smithsonian banned Frederick Douglass from speaking there on the grounds of 'science'. Go read what is put about in the Ukraine as true science about the inferior Russians. Look at what transgender ideologues say about the mutant 'feminists'.
In the end, these sometimes tendencies or movements quickly demorph in money-making, career promoting publicity business schemes. There isn't any science. There never was.
Thank you. Much to ponder.
Tommy Douglas — the father of socialized medicine in Canada and one of the country’s most beloved figures, and became premier of Saskatchewan province — once supported eugenic policies. In 1933, he received a Master of Arts in sociology from McMaster University for his thesis, “The Problems of the Subnormal Family.” In the thesis, Douglas recommended several eugenic policies, including the sterilization of “mental defectives and those incurably diseased.” True he later rejected this belief (but didn't give back his graduate degree), but who knows how much damage his thoughts and beliefs caused while he held them. Even today his political party, the NDP, are just fine with the downward slide of Canada's assisted suicide practices rather than actually helping people.
Tommy's weakness was his gullibility for things pronounced as 'scientific' by academia. Instead of seeing that this is just another business swindle promoted by self-serving capitalist racketeers. He should have known well that no sector is somehow above being corrupted by the regime.
In just the same way have the "Left", especially the NDP fallen all over themselves to sign onto the Covid horse shit. And so the lockdowns of the working class and cancelling of free speech. So, they are historical toast. They are now the class enemy.
Interesting! I didn't know that about Douglas, but it isn't the least bit surprising. Eugenics and progressivism were tightly intertwined.
Great, great post.
> The logo of the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921, pictured above, declared that “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution,” with the goal being “an harmonious entity.”
Treating H as a vowel. That right there should be enough to discredit them.
Serious question, though: Because of its connection with Nazism, eugenics is commonly treated today as a discredited theory that no one would take seriously. At the same time, Jewish populations (the most remarked-upon victims of Nazism) have all but eradicated Tay-Sachs disease by the use of genetic databases to restrict marriage and guide breeding along desired lines. Is there any valid reason (and "it's distasteful" is not a valid reason) to call this something other than eugenics?
I go both ways on the "h" thing. :) Unguarded, I would probably say "an historian," but "a harmonious entity." So I retain some credibility. :)
(1) I have written about Dor Yeshorim--the Jewish society that genetically screens prospective couples in the Haredi ("Ultraorthodox") community. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/when-genomics-meets-eugenics
(2) And I recently wrote a piece explaining why there IS a valid reason to avoid calling such programs "eugenics." Briefly, "eugenics" is a hopelessly spoiled brand name for an amorphous collection of concepts, many of which were intellectually incoherent and morally toxic. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/no-im-not-a-eugenicist. After I wrote that, a philosopher asked, if not "eugenics," then what we should use as an umbrella term for genetic screening, bans on sibling marriage, embryo selection, gene therapy, etc. I suggested calling those things "genetic screening," "bans on sibling marriage," "embryo selection," "gene therapy," etc. I said a problem with eugenics was its breadth and lack of definable borders. The umbrella term made it vulnerable to mission creep, motte-and-bailey ploys, and worse.
Sure, but was it SAFE & EFFECTIVE? It would
seem that eugenics has “evolved”…
Elaborate?
Well I’m no scholar of eugenics, but it seems like it used to be that eugenics consisted primarily of eliminating undesirables to improve the gene pools and attempts at chemical experiments to find the physiologies to improve performance and longevity. Now it’s “evolved” to vaccinating the proles with ostensible intent of mitigating potential negative health outcomes (or maybe causing more health issues create easily controlled wards of the state?) and transhumanism for the elites to enhance their power and extend their lives. The next phase in the evolution of feudalism. Check out the comments of Yuval Harari.
Transhumanism is not just for the "elites" any more than humanism is/was. It's the idea that it is possible and desirable to use technology to improve the human condition. Note that most transhumanists endorse the principle of "morphological freedom" according to which you own your body and have the right to decide what changes, if any, to make. The government has no right to make you do anything with your body. (The recent "technoprogressive" offshoot is far more friendly to government but they don't represent transhumanism.)
Thanks! I worked with a fellow a while back who introduced me to transhumanism. So, yes, I read about some of those internal debates. Interesting food for thought and discussion. I just subscribed to your feed and will read it with interest.
All interesting points. And not so different from the desires of the original eugenicists. New tools. And yes, I do read Yuval Harari. Thanks!
It seems to me that the unmentioned (directly) common denominator underlying the overall approach to our society by the "progressives" of both the past and present is the desire for command and control by an authoritarian government. The desire to rule us remains the paramount driver of the left, whether it be climate hysteria, Covid policy, economic regulation, etc. It is revealed by the open admission of its most vocal advocates to not let a crisis (ie: any negative occurrence) to go to waste.
Always hearing that eugenics has been 'discredited,' but never given real examples. Yes, you hear about the difficulties in eliminating recessive alleles, or mention of pleiotropy, complex traits, etc. But never is it explained why these arguments apply to eugenics but not to natural selection. No concrete explanations are ever given. Instead, discussion always seems to devolve into "who can decide what is a positive/negative trait" rhetoric.
The claim that eugenicists are "intolerant of dissent" is a new one. Hard to reconcile with the fact that eugenic advocates are now an invisibly small minority. Any examples of this 'intolerance' and how it's applied? Or is 'eugenics' here being employed as a sort of pejorative against a broader and ill-defined group of people concerned with human welfare? People who would no doubt never refer to themselves as 'eugenicists'?
DISCREDITED: The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939 because its data collection techniques were garbage. Buck v Bell presumed that Carrie Buck was genetically deficient because (a) her mother may have been a prostitute, (b) Carrie became pregnant as the result of a rape, (c) a random social worker said there was “something peculiar” about her six-month-old infant. In North Carolina, Wallace Kuralt had African American women sterilized because he just thought it was a helpful thing to do. Eugenicists were methodologically incompetent, prone in the extreme to confirmation bias, and about as scientific in their evaluation criteria as dog-show enthusiasts. And, of course, the Nazi extremes practically drove the word from common usage. You could fill tons of disk space with data on the many ways in which eugenics has been discredited on virtually every dimension.
INTOLERANT OF DISSENT: There is nothing new about that charge whatsoever. Eugenicists’ intolerance is well-document. As Thomas Leonard wrote in “Illiberal Reformers”: “Until the late 1920s, American geneticists supported eugenics or kept their reservations private while welcoming the funding and publicity eugenics generated. Herbert S. Jennings of Johns Hopkins University resigned from the American Eugenics Society in 1925, a year after writing to Irving Fisher that eugenics societies were no place for men of science. In 1927, his colleague Raymond Pearl, once a very active eugenicist, publicly repudiated eugenics in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, an apostasy that received national attention and caused the withdrawal of a job offer from Harvard.” There are numerous accounts of critics being shouted down and physically chased from scientific conferences for their apostasy.
My article does not refer to eugenicists today; you are correct in saying that people referring to themselves in 2022 as eugenicists are small in number. What I said was that “the eugenicists’ lack of skepticism and intolerance for dissent is very much with us in science and policy discussions today.” In other words, the sort of anti-skepticism and intolerance that eugenicists exhibited remains with us in various fields of science.
At any rate, thanks for commenting.
Thank you for the response.
"You could fill tons of disk space with data on the many ways in which eugenics has been discredited on virtually every dimension."
But you've only given examples from a single dimension, namely how the concept was poorly employed (prior to a developed understanding of genetics). Bad practice does not demonstrate that the concept itself is flawed.
"There is nothing new about that charge whatsoever."
I was talking about the present, of course. But giving examples of two prominent eugenicists repudiating eugenics doesn't really indicate closed-mindedness. Certainly not more so than many other fields.
"...the sort of anti-skepticism and intolerance that eugenicists exhibited remains with us in various fields of science."
So it's not a type of anti-skepticism that originated from, nor is distinctive just to, eugenics.
Glad to respond. I’ll assure you that intolerance was endemic to eugenics, that it was especially potent when compared with other sciences, and that there are endless examples. But this is a blog, not a dissertation. Over time, I’ll present lots more. ... ... As much as anything, the purpose of these essays is to give a taste of a problem and encourage lots of people to take deeper dives on their own. ... ... A fundamental problem with eugenics was that feeble or nonexistent evidence was instantly turned into monstrous public policies that violated individual liberties in horrific ways. I have occasionally assigned Max Born’s “Experiment and Theory in Physics” to economics classes to show how even the hardest of the hard sciences--subatomic theory and cosmology--became politicized (in some cases, by the same people who were pushing eugenics). But the arbitrary assumptions about the age of the universe that Born described did not lead to the physicists involved to say, “AH! I think the universe is 10 billion years old, not 1 billion years old--therefore, I will surreptitiously rip the Fallopian tubes out of tens of thousands of 13-year-old girls without telling them I’m doing so.” Eugenics mattered at the individual level in ways that others sciences did not--and this also created a feedback loop making eugenic science even crappier than it otherwise might have been on its own.
So, wasn't the core problem with eugenics that it was combined with a coercive policy approach? What about voluntary eugenic approaches such as embryo selection, genetic engineering to eliminate diseases, etc.?
Two issues, at least. One is the fine boundary between voluntary and coercive. Eugenics was originally supposed to be voluntary but quickly transmogrified. Second is the topic of my article—whether the word “eugenics” is so stained by its sordid history of coercion, scientific dishonesty, suppression of dissent, crackpot political movements, and unparalleled barbarity that it is effectively unstable—that the word itself can never be separated from that garbage. I think the word is ruined in that manner and that, furthermore, it is so closely identified with coercion, quackery, and barbarity that trying to resurrect the word invites observers to reconsider the unsavory parts. By all means, talk about embryo selection, genetic engineering, etc. — but call those things something other than “eugenics.” There are any number of things that were rebranded after the word became tainted. In my view, it should remain an historical term. There is no compelling reason to resurrect it for contemporary use—and lots of compelling reasons not to resurrect it.
Sadly, I agree that the term "eugenics" carries too many really bad connotations that it has to be abandoned. I can't think of a different umbrella term to replace it. I'm still fighting to keep "capitalism" despite it having been abused to mean massive government intervention and subsidies.
"Over time, I’ll present lots more..."
Okay, I certainly agree that politics and ideology can corrupt any field, and that something like eugenics is especially at risk. Hopefully, you'll delve into Wokeness, and how it's corrupting science and public policy. After all, per your example, we have thousands of kids *presently* being sterilized...
I decided last year to stope using the term “wokeness,” as it tends to turn off a segment of the population open to discussion and persuasion. But I am already getting deep into the issues that often travel under that term. For example: https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/11/24/the-pall-of-politics-descends-upon-american-medicine/, and the exchange that occurred after with the president of the AMA: https://www.discoursemagazine.com/letters-to-the-editor/2022/02/15/language-lessons-immanuel-kant-black-america-and-more-readers-join-the-discourse/. And the specific issue you mention is one where, whatever one thinks of the issue itself, even partial dissent is unwelcome and damaging to career prospects.
Most "science" is just racketeering. Budget-boosting, career mongering monopolies cloaked in white coats for the chumps. If you offer enough money Nobel Laureates will swear the moon is made of green cheese. Covid is/was a deliberate fraud driven by the cowardice of professionals to speak out against certain repression.
The organic contiuity between the constituencies behind the KKK and 'respectable' eugenics are clear for those who will see. Civil War era academic "Niggerology". The head of the Smithsonian banned Frederick Douglass from speaking there on the grounds of 'science'. Go read what is put about in the Ukraine as true science about the inferior Russians. Look at what transgender ideologues say about the mutant 'feminists'.
In the end, these sometimes tendencies or movements quickly demorph in money-making, career promoting publicity business schemes. There isn't any science. There never was.