Scientific Breeding

Taking Control of Evolution

"Eugenics" is currently a dirty word, a blasphemy.  However, we have conveniently overlooked that a mere seventy years ago it was perfectly respectable in both Britain and the United States.  The intellectual elite generally believed selective breeding was a key to overcome the dark past of the human race and facilitate a new dawn of civilisation. 

Then along came Adolf and the Nazis who not only took the idea seriously, but actively institutionalised it, making it official policy within the Reich.  For this scientific advance, the Nazis were accorded a good deal of respect before the war amongst the intelligentsia, on both sides of the Atlantic.  With the demise of Nazi Germany, however, and the horror of the "Ultimate Solution" exposed, the attraction of eugenics in the West suffered collateral damage. It was no longer fashionable in the salons.

Nevertheless, eugenics are still being promoted within academia in the West--tellingly without scandal or notoriety.
  This implies that in time it is likely to come back with great force and popular attraction. It is there.  It lurks.  It will come back.  Abortion--a wildly popular horror amongst elites in the West--is after all soft-eugenics.  It controls breeding for other social ends.  It is a very small step indeed between abortion and full blown eugenics, ideologically and ethically.

When there is no Christian foundation, but mere ether on which to ground social ethics, things can change rapidly.  Witness homosexual "marriage" --a mere thirty ago such a notion would have been regarded universally as either abhorrent or fanciful; consequently it was never debated because it would have been seen as outrageous or insane.  Now, the Commentariat is screaming for it, demanding it.  A complete ethical volte-face within half a lifetime.  Rapid change indeed. 

David Bentley Hart describes the on-going percolation of eugenics within academia--without controversy or scandal:

One would think it would be more scandalous than it is, for instance, that a number of respected philosophers, scientists, medical lecturers, and other "bioethicists" in the academic world not only continue to argue the case for eugenics, but do so in such robustly merciless terms.  The late Joseph Fletcher, for example, who was hardly an obscure or insignificant public philosopher, openly complained that modern medicine continues to contaminate our gene pool by preserving inferior genetic types, and advocated using legal coercion--including forced abortions--to improve the quality of the race.  It was necessary, he maintained, to do everything possible to spare society the burden of "idiots" and "diseased" specimens, and to discourage or prevent the genetically substandard from reproducing.  Indeed, he asserted, reproduction is not a right, and the law should set a minimum standard of health that any child should be required to meet before he or she might be granted entry into the world.

He also favoured Linus Pauling's proposed policy of segregating genetic inferiors into an immediately recognisable caste by affixing indelible marks to their brows, and suggested society might benefit from genetically engineering a subhuman caste of slave workers to perform dangerous or degrading jobs.

Now was Fletcher some lone, eccentric voice in the desert.  Peter Singer argues for the right to infanticide for parents of defective babies, and he and James Rachels have been tireless advocates for more expansive and flexible euthanasia policies, applicable at every stage of life, unencumbered by archaic Christian mystifications about the sanctity of every life.

"Transhumanists" like Lee Silver look forward to the day when humanity will take responsibility for its own evolution, by throwing off antique moral constraints and allowing ourselves to use genetic engineering in order to transform future generations of our offspring into gods (possessed even, perhaps, of immortality). . . .  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.234f.]

Baring widespread repentance throughout the West we expect that eugenics will become far more acceptable and popular in the next thirty years amongst the elites and the Commentariat.