What went wrong?
In The Pivot of Civilization, the Magster said that the feebleminded are the cause of all kinds of problems - poverty, crime, starvation, etc. so it would be best if didn't let them breed. In The Descent of Man, Chuck Darwin told us to use selective breeding to eliminate moral impurities. In Mein Kampf, Adolph Schicklegruber suggested that a strict program of breeding and slaughter would lead to a purer, dominant Aryan race. Well, those triumphant wills have departed and all we're left with are the ever-growing mounds of corpses. Millions of babies are slaughtered every year and for what? Are we marching towards a glorious, new earthly paradise? Hardly. Brilliantly argued eugenic theory is now being used in the service of Hugh Hefner.
Pathetic.
10 comments:
Schicklengruber?
I don't recognize any of these names.
I'm thankful we've discarded their philosophies to the ash heap of history.
To pursue a culture of death over that of life is pretty twisted.
So glad we've got that figured out.
Link forthcoming.
Hasn't a lot of evil always been in pursuit of trivial ends? Didn't King David get into a lot of trouble because he had a man killed just so he could sleep with the guy's wife?
And when Genghis Khan conquered a large fraction of the world and murdered a few million people to do it, did he have any greater purpose in mind than loot and sex?[1]
[1] There is an estimate that as much as 0.5% of all the men in the world are male-line descendants of Genghis Kahn. You don't leave that sort of a mark without being pretty heavily involved with women, is what I'm saying.
Incidentally, I'd like to speak up in defense of Charles Darwin regarding whether he was in favor of eugenics or not. While he did write that "preserving the sick in body and mind" would tend to result in physically and mentally weaker descendants, he then immediately followed that with this statement:
"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally
acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected."
It's pretty clear to me that he thought that any benefits of selective breeding of people would be greatly outweighed by the evil that would have to be committed in doing it. The sum total of his support of eugenics appears to be to nicely ask people with heritable problems to consider refraining from having children.
Dean, Adolph Hitler was not born Hitler, but was born Adolph Schicklegruber. Awesome, no?
Tim, you're absolutely right that there have been plenty of big evils that have been in pursuit of nothing more than looting, pillaging and raping. However, they pale in comparison to the monstrously huge evils like Communism and Nazism. Where's the utopian vision in today's evil?
Tim, you make a good point about Darwin. I had wondered how much cherry-picking the author of 10 Books That Screwed Up The World did with Darwin's Descent of Man. I think the point he was trying to make was that Darwin's somewhat mild suggestions about eugenics were used as a springboard for some truly horrible eugenic treatises later.
My checked my irony device at the door. ;)
Duhhhh.
Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.
Point that one at obama who voted for late term abortions and blocked a move to allow doctors to aid aborted babies who were 'born' alive instead of leaving them in a laundry room to die.
The measure of a man is how he treats the weak and helpless, the left make a big song and dance about 'helping the unfortunate' but in practise they fail the test unless they can make them dependent on the guvmint and thereby secure their votes.
ligneus, I think my brain had deliberately blocked that horror. I had forgotten about that.
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