February 4, 2006

Eugenics is a philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through social intervention. The aim is to create more intelligent people, save world resources, lessen human suffering and reduce health problems.

Selective breeding was suggested at least as far back as Pluto, who believed that human reproduction should be controlled by the government. During the 1860s and 1870s Sir Francis Galton formulated these ideas and practices with new information provided by his cousin Charles Darwin.

He reasoned that since many human societies tend to protect the weak and the underprivileged, those societies were, in effect, at odds with the natural selection responsible for the extinction of the weakest. Only by changing these policies, Galton thought, could society be saved from a “reversion towards mediocrity”.

Galton first sketched out his theory in an article he wrote in 1865 titled Hereditary talent and character. He expanded upon this in his book Hereditary genius (1869).

He began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton’s basic argument was that “genius” and “talent” were hereditary traits in humans (although neither he nor Darwin had a working model of this type of heredity). He concluded that since one could use artificial selection to exaggerate traits in animals, one should expect similar results in humans.

Eugenics spread like wildfire in all western societies towards the beginning of the twentieth century. The Nazis only took up a prevalent theory and then advanced it to new heights of human immorality.

Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler was infamous for its eugenics programme. Hitler had repeatedly blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I and for subsequent economic hardships. He also put forward racial theories asserting that Germans, with fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes, were the supreme form of the human, or master race. The Jews, according to Hitler, were the racial opposite, and were actively engaged in an international conspiracy to keep this master race from assuming its rightful position as rulers of the world.

Jews at that point in time comprised only about 1 per cent of the German population of 55 million. They were gradually shut out of the German society by the Nazis through a long series of laws and decrees, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which deprived them of their citizenship and forbade intermarriage with non-Jews.

They were removed from schools, banned from the professions, excluded from military service, and were even forbidden to share a park bench with a non-Jew. During the 1930s and 1940s the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people who they viewed as mentally and physically “unfit” and killed thousands of the institutionalized disabled under their compulsory euthanasia programmes.

This was one of the worst examples of eugenics. The ideology behind the mass killing of Jews was a mixture of racial hatred, and the same racial hygiene outlook found in the euthanasia programme of the Nazis. Among the prominent people who strengthened this ideology were Dr Fiecher and Prof Fritz Lenz.

Dr Fiecher published a study of people whom he called “Rohobother bastards”. They were children of mixed unions between Boers and Hottentots. He reached the conclusion that these children were, as he put it, “of lesser racial quality.”

He added: “We should provide them with the minimum amount of protection which they require, for survival as a race inferior to ourselves, and we should do this only as long as they are useful to us. After this, free competition should prevail and, in my opinion, this will lead to their decline and destruction.”

This thought prevailed even among the doctors of the Nazi era. Dr Klein was asked how he would reconcile with the appalling medical experiments he carried out in Auschwittz with his oath as a doctor. He replied: “Of course, I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenuous appendix from a diseased body. The jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”

When Nazi administrators were on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified their mass sterilization by pointing a finger at the United States as their inspiration where the second largest eugenics movement had taken place in the 1890s.

Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states in the US had enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. In 1924, the Immigration Restriction Act was passed in the US, on the threat of “inferior stock” from Eastern and Southern Europe. In this act, for the first time eugenicists played a central role in the congressional debate as expert advisers.

Some states in the US allowed sterilization of the “imbeciles” for much of the 20th century. The US Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck vs Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those they deemed unfit.

Between 1907 and 1963 — the most significant era for eugenic sterilization — over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.

Many other western nations also adopted some eugenics legislation. Sweden forcibly sterilized 62,000 “unfits” as part of a eugenics programme over a 40-year-period. Similar incidents occurred in Canada, Australia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland and Iceland for people the government had declared mentally deficient. Singapore practised a limited form of “positive” eugenics which involved encouraging marriages between college graduates in the hope that they would produce better children.

The Nazi excesses arose from small beginnings. Such a progression initially required only four factors; favourable public opinion, a handful of willing physicians, economic pressures and no prosecution for those involved. All of these conditions are present today in various parts of the western world.

The remaining ingredients were a eugenic social policy and war. It is sobering to remember that the two most devastating wars in the history of mankind took place in the last century from failed political alliances in Europe.

The many similarities between Germany of the 1930s and the direction in which western medicine is moving today give great cause for alarm. The 55 million abortions per year worldwide, pressure for infanticide, trends in embryo research and pre-natal eugenics, and the growing acceptance and practice of euthanasia in Australia, the US and the Netherlands ring familiar bells. All run counter to post-war ethical declarations adopted by the World Medical Association.

This, coupled with growing health propaganda, specious euphemisms, obsession with cost-benefit analysis, computerized knowledge and a developing intimacy between profession and state leave no room for complacency.

The important conclusion is that it is a mistake to let any system of belief, including a system of ethics, becoming too abstract through science progression. There are dangers of getting far removed from ordinary emotional values. Also, it is high time we stop thinking of racial purity and of lesser racial purity.

There is a need for more thought about the necessity of replacing evolutionary selective pressures. All of us shudder when we see where this kind of thought led to, but few try to find out exactly what is wrong with the arguments.

The fact that we can deal with some disorder, so that people with them are able to survive and have children who then may inherit the disorder, is supposed to be the real problem. But, in the case of a disorder where people find their lives worth living, it is not a disaster at all if the same is passed on through genes.

In the stone age, people with poor sight may have lost out due to evolutionary competition. Spectacles and contact lenses are among the reasons why they now survive to have children. Their lives are not a disaster, and there is no reason why it should be deemed a disaster if their children inherit short-sightedness.

To the extent that modern medicine makes possible not just survival, but a decent quality of life, the problem to which eugenics was supposed to be the answer is not a real one.

The writer abbas.rz@gmail.com is a freelance contributor