THE LEFTIST ROOTS OF EUGENICS

My post about Hitler’s eugenics making him simply a typical Leftist of his times has energized one reader to comment as follows:

“You are right to point out the socialist roots of eugenics. Bertrand Russell was a true believer in the eugenic State and even saw socialised medicine as a key step in imposing State planning over procreation. In a letter to his first wife, feminist Alys Pearsall Smith, about socialism and “the woman question,” for example, he writes:

"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child — this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways."

(Quoted from here)

The few critics of eugenics in the early 20th century were mainly conservatives and Christians like G.K. Chesterton who saw eugenic planning as just another arm of the wider campaign to impose a "scientific" socialist planning. In fact Chesterton subtitled his anti-eugenics tract "Eugenics and Other Evils" as: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State".

Modern commentators usually emphasise the "racist" (or more accurately "racialist") dimensions of the eugenics program and manage to wholly white out the socialist element. This is an example, not only of our intellectual class's pro-socialist bias, but of anachronistic thinking, projecting current attitudes back through time.

In the early part of the century socialists had no qualms about racialist thinking as anyone who reads Karl Marx no doubt knows. Of course this kind of thinking was commonplace then, however the marriage of socialism and racialism certainly gave birth to Nazism, probably the most violent and virulent form of racialism ever experienced. Most current critics of Nazism only blame one of it's parents!

The racialist thinking of the eugenic socialists was quite "scientific" and progressive in it's day, much as 'global warming' is seen as scientific and progressive today. At that time "group selection" models of evolution were dominant, and it was quite common to see "race" as the group being selected. It was really only in the 1960s that these models of evolution were really overturned.

Thankfully the obvious evils of Nazism forced many socialists to rethink their racialism, unfortunately leaving their loving faith in State supremacy and social engineering firmly intact. That Stalin's State equalled or exceeded Hitler in violence under the cloak of international brotherhood was frankly ignored. In fact many on the left have now commenced a new crusade in the name of anti-racism and multiculturalism. However laudable these goals, the implementation often bulldozes individual rights and autonomy, just as the old eugenicist planners did.

Many of the eugenics true believers continued on postwar moving into campaigns for legalised abortion, planned parenthood and population control. In fact some conservative critics have highlighted the racist roots of much of the liberal pro-abortion movement.

In the scientific world it is not impossible to imagine a swing back to group selectionism. Many "sensitive" commentators attack neo-Darwinism and individual selectionism as "reductionist" and thus bad. And the old idea of race is certainly not scientifically dead. The real question is, if these scientific concepts revive, will the socialists return to their old habits? And will the supporters of individual freedom be strong enough to stop them?”

And eugenics of a sort IS back on the Left: The Zero Population Growth nutters are back with their “people are pollution” attitudes! Only this time they want to HALVE our population! And it does seem to be the old gang from the 1960’s again -- including Paul Ehrlich (if ever a surname was a misnomer that is: “ehrlich” is German for “honest”). The abject failure of their earlier prophecies -- e.g. that we would all be doomed by the 1970s -- has not dampened them down a bit. As “Spiked” points out in reply however, “Rising living standards and rising populations go hand-in-hand.” But the doomsters ignore history, of course. They even ignore the present! The world’s population has never been so large -- and prosperity worldwide has never been so great. Even India and China are forging ahead now that they have unleashed capitalism.

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