No, I'm Not a Eugenicist

Plus, ten films with a sprinkling of economics

A Eugenics Society poster (1930s) from the Wellcome Library Eugenics Society Archive. Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons.

Diana Fleischman (at

Dissentient

) is an evolutionary psychologist who has written a long, thoughtful, informative, and provocative piece on eugenics. The only thing wrong with it is its central thesis, which I think is dead wrong. She argues that if one is opposed to a brother marrying his sister, resulting in a string of disabled children, then, “[C]ongratulations, you’re a eugenicist.” Further, she argues that, “[M]ost intellectuals are either too ignorant or afraid of public reproach to give [eugenic] ideas an open hearing.”

In her essay, “You’re Probably a Eugenicist,” Fleischman argues:

• A long list of contemporary practices (e.g., bans on sibling marriage, genetic counseling, care in choosing one’s spouse, mandatory treatment of syphilis) were also promoted by eugenicists.

• Eugenics produced some contemptible things (e.g., 70,000 forced sterilizations in America, demonization of whole demographics on spurious grounds, sloppy scientific methods, suppression of academic debate, the Holocaust). But psychiatry gave us lobotomies and democracy gave us the Third Reich. Therefore, since we are still comfortable with the words “psychiatry” and “democracy,” we ought to be comfortable with “eugenics.”

• Given commonly accepted views on a series of litmus tests, we therefore should admit to being eugenicists and welcome the word “eugenics” back into polite society.

The fatal error in Fleischman’s argument is its moral relativism and whataboutism: eugenicists did some good stuff and some bad stuff, but so too did psychiatrists and democracies, so let’s reinstate eugenics as a respectable science. She provides a fascinating arboretum of beneficial trees but misses the overwhelming malevolence of the forest. The problem is that whatever bits of good might have come out of eugenics, they are overwhelmed by monstrosities unleashed by its progenitors. It is difficult or impossible to name any scientific and/or political project in human history that rained down as much destruction as eugenics. To her credit, Fleischman lists plenty of those horrors in her essay.

Whatever it was in the beginning, eugenics soon became Eugenics™—a toxic, discredited brand name that is no more redeemable than Radithor™, Ayds™, ValuJet™, Bon Vivant™, National Socialism™, or Fascism™. Bon Vivant made lots of good vichyssoise, but after it served up some cans of botulism, no one will ever sell soup under that name again. You may be in favor of low-cost, no-frills air travel from Florida, but after ValuJet’s lax safety standards fed a planeload of passengers to Everglades alligators, “ValuJet” ceased to be a viable trademark. You might favor government ownership of semi-autonomous corporations, decision-making by expert elites, a powerful presidency, and a strong sense of national sovereignty—but if you put “fascist” on your business card, you’re either naïve or … … a fascist.

Fleischman correctly notes that many respectable positions today resemble concepts advocated a century ago by eugenicists. From this, she jumps to assertions that anyone holding those views today is a eugenicist:

Do you agree that women should be allowed to abort embryos with genetic defects or that couples from a small genetic pool, like Ashkenazi Jews, should be allowed to seek out genetic counseling before they marry? With regard to these issues, you’re a eugenicist. …

If you agree that people who are genetically related should not have children, or should see a genetic counselor, congratulations, you’re a eugenicist. …

If you think it’s good for egg and sperm banks to screen donors for disability or mental health problems, you’re a eugenicist. …

If you think it is right for the government to punish gamete vendors who do not adequately screen for such problems, you’re a eugenicist. …

If you think it makes sense that customers would want gametes from mentally stable people without a criminal record, you’re a eugenicist. …

Eugenicists also initiated the mandatory treatment of infectious diseases like syphilis, which causes blindness, deafness, and cognitive disability. If you think women should be treated for sexually transmitted infections or rubella so they don’t have a disabled child, you’re advocating the same goals as many historical eugenicists.

In my own writings, I’ve also noted the positive contributions that eugenics made to modern science. For example, my The Briar and the Rose: The Common Origins of Eugenics and Mathematical Statistics notes that the field of mathematical statistics (applied probability theory) was largely the brainchild of eugenicists, “to give scientific heft to their snobbery and racism—and to validate eugenic social engineering programs.”

Like Fleischman, I’ve also written on Dor Yeshorim, on Iceland’s eradication of Down Syndrome, and on other modern echoes of eugenics. But in my When Genomics Meets Eugenics: Dor Yeshorim and the Shadowlands of Medical Ethics the ethicists are not saying, “Hey, we’re eugenicists!” They’re asking—as they should— “Oh, crap … are we becoming eugenicists?” And those asking the questions are neither ignorant nor afraid.

Mind you, Fleischman’s essay is well worth reading—chock full of eugenics exotica. I’ve studied and taught about eugenics for nearly 30 years, and her article offered some items I had never heard—including Chinese eugenicist Pan Guangdan’s efforts to eliminate foot-binding and Lee Kuan Yew’s eugenic matchmaking among Singapore’s cognitive elite. But those nuggets pale next to the damage done by eugenicists.

Francis Galton may originally have envisioned eugenics as a sort of twee speed-dating effort—swells marrying swells. But the movement soon became a dark menagerie of logical fallacies, impoverished data collection methods, rank bigotry disguised as science, and browbeating scientific dissenters into silence. For that matter, Galton’s neologism— “eugenics”—came 10 years after he had suggested that Chinese settlers be brought to Africa to displace indigenous blacks, whom he considered to be inferior. Alexander Graham Bell, arguably one of the most thoughtful, well-intentioned, introspective American eugenicists of all, still managed to wreck Deaf education for nearly a century, based on misguided eugenic theories.

Eugenicists fantasized over industrial-scale euthanasia to achieve their desired society. In 1908, D. H. Lawrence wrote:

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’

Eugenics underlay the anti-immigration legislation of the 1920s. Would-be immigrants were refused entry on the basis of nonsensical IQ tests deemed to express genetic weaknesses. My home state, Virginia passed a mandatory sterilization law in the 1920s that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its notorious 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling, spearheaded by eugenicists and validated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, with his haunting words:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

In that case, a teenaged girl was found to be genetically substandard because her mother was suspected of being a prostitute, she herself was impregnated by a rape, and a social worker testified that her six-month old daughter was “somewhat peculiar.” The case against Carrie Buck was greatly aided by the testimony of Harry Laughlin, one of America’s uppermost eugenicists. Though he had never met Buck, he declared her to be part of:

the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.

Godwin’s Law implores writers not to invoke Nazi references, but that is simply not possible in the case of eugenics. Madison Grant, who was instrumental in founding or operating the Bronx Zoo, Denali National Park, Glacier National Park, Save the Redwoods, and the field of wildlife management itself, wrote The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler would term “My Bible.” In Virginia, Dr. Joseph DeJarnette performed hundreds of sterilizations at Western State Hospital, and according to the Encyclopedia Virginia:

In 1934 he implored the [state legislature] to broaden the scope of Virginia’s sterilization law; “the Germans,” he complained, “are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are.” DeJarnette never wavered in his advocacy of eugenics, not even after the revelation of the Nazi Holocaust, and he often recited or appended to his publications on eugenic sterilization a poem that he had composed, “Mendel’s Law: A Plea for a Better Race of Men.”

Rudolf Hess declared that Nazism was "nothing but applied biology," and my guess has always been, given eugenics, he was 100% sincere in that monstrous pronouncement.

In 1936, with the ill intents of the Nazi regime fully evident, Harry Laughlin accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his work on behalf of the "science of racial cleansing.” In the postwar Nuremberg Trials, defense attorneys for accused war criminals cited American sterilization laws as vindication for their clients. In Virginia, eugenic sterilizations continued until 1979. In 1943, Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia’s de facto chief eugenicist, born just prior to the Civil War, boasted that his racial genealogies on Virginians were likely more complete than Hitler’s research into Jewish genealogy.

Fleischman notes that:

The North Carolina Eugenics Board coerced thousands of Black women into getting sterilized.  

That board existed under that name till 1977. California was conducting eugenic sterilizations on female prisoners—mostly African American and Hispanic American, until 2014.

With all that history, Fleischman defends resurrecting the word “eugenics”:

Unlike eugenics, every conversation about democracy, foster care, psychiatry, or contraception [does] not devolve into outrage about how they are slippery slopes to genocide, mutilation, and racism. We ought to be capable of decoupling the history of a concept from its intention if the potential outcomes are good enough.

You might be asking yourself—why use the term “eugenics” at all? Can’t you just call it something different?

Well, not really.

We are not going to stop hearing about eugenics. Every time someone tries to call it something different, the “e” word and its association with historic injustice and abuse is invoked to end the discussion before it can begin.

With all due respect, there is not enough disinfectant on earth to cleanse the reputation of eugenics—or the word itself. The horrors above offer only a tiny introduction to the full breadth of damage done under that banner. By all means, talk about abortion after genetic screenings, genetic counseling for couples, quality control at sperm banks, ideal marriage partners, and so forth. But contrary to Fleischman’s assertions, you can’t call these things “eugenics” without inviting Francis Galton, Madison Grant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harry Laughlin, D. H. Lawrence, Walter Ashby Plecker, and Rudolf Hess back into your parlor.

In 1983, three episodes of TV’s police procedural, Hill Street Blues, featured a struggling standup comedian who was quite funny but couldn’t pay a large load of parking tickets because he couldn’t get any gigs. The problem, we learned, was that his birth name and stage name was “Vic Hitler.” He was a funny, sweet, ingenuous character who had promised his dying father that he would never allow Adolf Hitler (whom his father insisted was actually “Adolf Schicklgruber”) to drive him away from their old and honorable family name. The running joke was that every member of the viewing audience and every single character on the show other than Vic himself understood that the name “Hitler” was radioactive and irredeemable, and that no heartfelt nods to Vic’s honorable ancestors could change that basic fact.

“Eugenics” suffers from the same problem. Sometimes, a word is just a word. Other times, a word is everything. Let eugenics fester in its lead-lined coffin.

Lagniappe

Ten Films with a Sprinkling of Economics

1. A Beautiful Mind: An important film in that the hero is a hunky economist (or, at least, a hunky mathematician who does economics).

2. Chinatown: The plot revolves around the economics of water rights in California.

3. Daniel: Fictionalized account of the Rosenberg Atomic Spy case. Mediocre film about communism versus capitalism. But cinematically important because my wife (Alanna), our friend (Charlie), and I were extras in a crowd scene with 5,000 or so others. In the film, barely perceptible on screen, Ed Asner emerges from an alleway, and shoves me into Alanna, who then falls off the curb and disappears behind the crowd. We occupy perhaps 0.1% of the screen.

4. It’s a Wonderful Life: Terrific explanation of the principles of fractional-reserve banking. Offered me the opportunity in class to stand on my desk and imitate Jimmy Stewart.

5. Local Hero: Rare example of non-Spanish magic realism. Dry-as-the-Sahara humor with bits of economics. Best-ever example of opportunity cost (lobstermen who never eat lobster because it’s too expensive.) Negotiators who agree on the nominal price but haggle over whether the agreed-upon number is in dollars or pounds. Also includes a capitalist Soviet, a guilt-ridden oilman, a Scottish linguist who speaks a spate of languages but can’t read road signs in Gaelic, a marine biologist/mythical creature, and loads of colorful Scottish locals.

6. The Man Who Would Be King: Kipling’s story faithfully translated to screen. Two 19th Century British enlisted men set off to conquer a mountainous region north of India. Interesting bits of game theory in their strategy.

7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Pivotal scene for an economist: Baby-face Nelson, in the process of robbing a bank, calmly explains to another character why banks construct expensive, marble buildings. (You can find the answer in Steven Landsburg’s book, The Armchair Economist.) The Coen Brothers, who made this film, are sons of an economics professor, and I suspect this scene is a result of their parentage.

8. The Treasure of Sierra Madre: Based on the novel by B. Traven, the most enigmatic author of the 20th Century. The movie is the story of three gold prospectors and the dark side of human nature. The old prospector discusses the reason for gold’s value. His explanation is a fantastic exposition of Marx’s labor theory of value.

9. 2001: A Space Odyssey: Masterpiece. Interesting for the overly optimistic expectations regarding artificial intelligence and the anticipated costs of space travel.

10. The Wizard of Oz: Some argue that the original Oz book was a parable on the Free Silver controversy of the late 19th Century. Dubious claim, but often cited. The movie could hardly be better.

Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.