The
History and Practice of Eugenics.
(This Article will be divided into several parts.)
If
you have ever heard of eugenics, you have probably only heard about
it in reference to blacks or the Nazi Holocaust. But you need to be
aware of it even if you are not black or Jewish. Because it is being
used in the 21st century to eliminate more that just those two groups
of people. If you do not belong to one of the elite families who
wield power around the world, you have the potential to become a
victim of eugenics, thanks to the modern advances of genetics,
nano-technology and robotics.
In
the 1800's, geneticists believed that they could use science to prove
that degeneracy was an hereditary trait. And if it was, the premise
was that these people should be prevented from reproducing. Eugenics
is the self direction of human evolution. It was also explained by
Sir Francis Galton as "the study of the agencies under social
control, that improve or impair the racial qualities of future
generations either physically or mentally."Eugenicists believed
that if people were poor and unfortunate and disadvantaged, it was
because they were genetically inferior.
The basis for eugenics came from
Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who believed in something
called positive eugenics, and selective breeding for the upper
classes. He is considered the father of eugenics. The result of these
two men's ideas is called Social Darwinism. The fathers of these two
men and a man named Josiah Wedgwood pledged that their families would
only breed with each other. You can see their family tree charting
the characteristics of philosophy, science and art, here: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/index2.html?tag=1061
There is an easier to follow chart here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%E2%80%93Wedgwood_family
So
to them, it was not just a theory, they intended to put it into
practice. They believed that within a few generations, their gene
pool would produce super men. The Darwin's were scientists and
doctors. The Galtons made their money through arms manufacture, but
diversified into banking later. The Wedgewood family are famous for
Wedgewood blue pottery.
Francis
Galton was born in 1822. He dropped out of school in 1842, at the age
of 20. But he inherited a fortune two years later. In the 1850's he
was studying genetics and the family trees of noble families. In
1869, he wrote a book titled, Hereditary Genius. It had some of his
early ideas on the subject of eugenics, without actually calling it
that name. He believed that the lower classes would out breed the
upper classes who practiced restraint. It would be necessary to take
steps "to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a
better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable." It
is interesting to speculate to what degree the fact that his marriage
did not produce children, effected his opinions. Upon his death, he
left his fortune to London University for an endowment for a
Professional chair on eugenics. There were many people from different
backgrounds interested in the subject. One of Galton's friends, Karl
Pearson, was a statistician. Tracking statistics would have been
highly valuable to the field.
As I said before, Social Darwinism was
also part of eugenics. It was the idea that Darwin's ideas had to be
applied to humans, so that the race wouldn't be over run by
degenerates. It is an entirely human tendency to feel that you are
better than other people who are different than you are. Eugenicists
were mostly from the upper class, and therefore considered themselves
better than the lower classes. If the upper class were the "fittest"
then the lower classes were considered "unfit." In the
U.S., the lower classes were predominantly black or some other
minority. So, it took on racist tones from the start. Although it
wasn't only aimed at blacks. Irish Catholics and Jews were a target.
The Irish posed a threat to Anglo-Saxon Americans because they were
competition for jobs, land and space. And they fell into the idea of
being considered "others" because they were mostly
Catholic, and Americans were mostly Protestants. And Jews were often
darker complected. as well as being historically blamed for all the
ill in the world by Christians. The lower races, the poor, and
mentally handicapped were said to be sexually immoral. Sex was not
usually addressed directly in polite conversation. But in the minds
of upper class people. children being born were evidence of sex just
by their very existence. The lower classes supposed tendency to be
preoccupied with sex, was considered degeneracy, or in other words,
morally corrupt. Degeneracy referred to physical short comings, and
moral ones, like promiscuity, alcoholism, and criminal tendencies.
The other term used to single people out was feeble-mindedness. This
included both mental illness and a low I.Q. I will cover how I.Q
tests were used in the field of eugenics later. Since they were
supposedly using science, alcoholism and crime were evidence that you
were degenerate, incapacitated and feeble-minded.
Sir
Frances Galton, the father of eugenics studied twins and family
traits, and began the nature vs. nurture debate that continues today.
He believed in Positive Eugenics, which encouraged the reproduction
of imminent men whose family accomplishments, which he had tied to
human progress. The opposite of Positive Eugenics is the
discouragement of reproduction in people who are considered to have
undesirable traits, and blamed for hindering human progress. While he
cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions from his work,
his work was ultimately used just as his cousin Charles Darwin's was
to justify, some awful crimes throughout history.
Some
people point out that he eventually rejected slavery, but his family
derived their wealth from slavery, and he did not reject it until
after it had ended.
"I
do not join in the belief that the African is our equal in brain or
in heart; I do not believe that the average negro cares for his
liberty as much as an Englishman or even as a serf-born Russian; and
I believe that if we can, in any fair way, possess ourselves of his
services, we have an equal right to utilize them to our
advantage..."(Frances Galton, 1857)
"...average
Negroes possess too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control
to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable
form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and
support." (Frances Galton, 1873)
Most people do not know that Charles
Darwin himself, was racist. "At some future period, not very
distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will
almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races
throughout the world...The break between man and his nearest allies
will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more
civilized state...and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now
between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla." (Charles
Darwin, 1890)
He was saying in a very polite way that
black people were a link between man and gorillas or baboons.
The original title to The Origin of
Species had subtitles. The original title was, On the Origin of
Species, By Means Of Natural Selection Or The Preservation Of Favored
Races In The Struggle For Life. The later editions had the shorter
and more politically correct title.
I
find it highly ironic that Francis Galton left his studies due to a
mental breakdown, being that he felt that mental incapacity, was
relegated to the lower classes. He even wrote this: "Men who
leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted
and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by
a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of
insanity." Another biographical fact that was of interest to me
was the fact that he was a Mason. In 1844 he became a member of the
"Scientific Lodge."
People
of color have been viewed as not quite the equal of even well meaning
white people since the days of abolition. While they felt that some
time in the future, that black slaves might catch up and become
equal, even men who were considered to be open minded enlightened
thinkers, believed blacks to be inferior and colonialism was based on
the idea that whites had a Christian duty to help them become more
like whites by force if necessary. The believed that they had to send
missionaries to places like Africa and India to bring the peoples
there over to their religion, ideology, and social customs, which to
them were obviously superior. They had to civilize the uncivilized.
Eventually, the abolitionists and missionaries came to the conclusion
that people of color could not be civilized and should be
exterminated. Where British men and women went to settle, like in
Australia, they held the view that the races were arranged into some
sort of hierarchy, with them at the top. So, since the Aboriginal
people were at the bottom of that hierarchy, they were justified in
treating them like sub-human animals. When they had to compete with
them for land, they felt justification in killing them. In Tasmania,
they wiped out almost all of the approximate 5000-6000 Aboriginal
people. The British began colonizing Tasmania in 1803, about 25 years
after they settled in Botany Bay. When they were down to a few
hundred, the governor, decided to send a missionary who had been
working amongst them to convert them to Christianity, to round them
up under the premise of negotiating a treaty with them. He convinced
them to go to an island with the missionary supposedly temporarily,
so that they would be safe and be able to live in peace. As in the
manner of US reservations this place really turned out to be a place
to finish removing their culture from them and force them to become
civilized Christians. They eventually became susceptible to European
diseases because they were worn down physically and mentally. The
result was that almost all of the remainder of them died off. The
place where they moved them to, had been a convict station, and was
abandoned, because it was not considered a fit place for convicts to
live. There have been some people recently, who say that through
studying the records, there is no evidence that there was any
conflict between the whites and the Aborigines. But the fact remains,
that by 1825, there were 13,000 whites, to the original 5,000
Aboriginal people. They didn't stand a chance.(Forgotten
Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory - Page 71,René Lemarchand -
2011)
By
the 1840's, all around the world the Christian abolitionists found
that the peoples that they sought to civilize did not learn to be
civilized as quickly as they had hoped they would, and in places like
the Caribbean where the whites were losing money in the sugar cane
plantations, began to say that it was because the missionaries had
been wrong and that civilizing blacks was never going to work because
they were born lazy and inferior. Thomas Carlisle was a British
writer and historian, and he was among those who began to call for
returning to some sort of slavery. People began to be swayed back to
the idea, that there was a proper order that things should be ran in.
Men should rule over women, white people should rule over people of
color, educated people should rule over uneducated people, because
they knew what was best. Many imminent writers of the time held
opinions that we would now recognize as racist. Charles Dickens wrote
about the inequality of classes, but he was only concerned with
whites. William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote Vanity Fair, was
racist. "It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety
of England." Charles Kingesley who wrote Water Babies, was a
racist. They showed this by showing support for the governor of
Jamaica who had been put on trial for ordering his troops to kill 500
Jamaicans and burn their homes in the 1860's. Many people believed
that he was justified in doing it , because blacks only understood
brute force and violence. During the Victorian period, anatomy was
flourishing due to the study of dead bodies. Robert Knox wrote a book
called The Race of Man. He said that race was important in
everything. Literature, science, art, and civilization as a whole
depends on race. It would determine your character, your position in
society, and your destiny as a whole. He said, "Can the black
races become civilized? I should say not." He was using the
science of anatomy to base his opinions on, a scientific basis for
racism. He believed that whites and blacks were in a war of
extermination, and that one or the other must prevail.
Samuel
G. Morton collected the skulls of people of different races and
studied them. Skulls were deemed to be of importance because they
held the brain, and the bigger the skull the bigger the brain. The
American School of Race Sciences decided that the skulls of the races
were so different that they must be different species. They began to
think that other races were not lower races of man, but probably not
human at all.
But the person who had the greatest
effect on racism was Charles Darwin. Because of his theory of natural
selection, people began to feel that whites had evolved into
something superior to people of color. And it justified British
Colonialism. People like Thomas Henry Huxley, ancestor of Aldous and
Julian, and the economist Herbert Spencer began to be what we call
Social Darwinists. Darwin’s theory said that all through nature,
the most successful organisms were the ones that specialized. And
British people were specialized at expanding. They were the most
recently evolved, and the most successful at it, and by default, the
other races that were in competition would naturally be eliminated.
They would disappear because they couldn't compete. The more
successful they were at wiping out other people and expanding their
territory, the more they saw it as proof that they were right and
were the superior species.
It didn't take long for British people
to begin seeing each other as separate races, Cockney people, Welsh
people, Scottish people were referred to as races. So whatever your
economic status in society, was a result of your race and defined
your race. But in direct opposition to Darwin’s theories, the lower
classes multiplied faster than their so called superiors. Darwin’s
cousin, Frances Galton was deeply affronted and frightened by the
fact that those he considered the least fit, were surviving, and felt
that he had to stop it. Thus eugenics came into being because he felt
that the middle classes should be encouraged to multiply and the
lower classes discouraged and prevented from multiplying in an
attempt to direct human evolution.
