Eugenics and Other Evils
A reader with the aspiring name Ascendant (who makes the effort to imply, but not very convincingly, he is a baptized Christian) writes in to praise the theory and practice of Eugenics, which he avers can be reconciled with Christianity.
Because the intimate way one must address a brother in Christ differs from the more distant and courteous way one must address a heathen, who know not their left hand from their right, I will write two replies, one if Ascendant is a Christian, and one if he is not.
Here is the my first answer, my reply if he is a Christian:
“One can be humble before God whilst realizing fully their superior biological endowment … a good breeder does not let his stock develop inferior traits.”
As one Christian brother to another, I assume the “superior biological endowment” refers to the size of his schlong, which is no doubt of an impressive and virile dimension.
I will pass without comment the insolent contradiction involved between a profession of Christian humility and the description of one’s fellow man made in the image of God, the wretched, poor and weak of the world, as livestock.
“Only the most conscious among us take the reigns and govern our own biological destiny. Traditionally, they were the aristocracy. In the modern era, they are eugenicists.”
I am not sure what biological destiny the aristocrats of any real (by which I mean “non-make-believe”) period of history governed. The aristos I encounter in the history books I read kept mistresses and visited whore and fathered random bastards, often abandoned. It was usually the middle class who had more middle class values, and did more to control their reproductive impulses and outcomes.
So we can take the word “aristocrat” here in a non-literal sense. Ascendant uses the word merely to imply that eugenicists have the innate refinement, superiority and nobility of the land-owning military families of the ancient world (without actually, you know, having fought in any wars or owned any land or ornamented their leisure by the study of any useful arts or sciences).
The clearest Christian commentary on the idea Ascendant proposes is found in the Book of Exodus, where the Pharaoh seized the reigns of biological destiny by ordering all male children born of the Hebrew slave-race thrown to the crocodiles. The divine retaliation for this act was to set the Angel of Death to walk among the Egyptians, slaying all the firstborn of those who did not have the saving blood of the lamb anointing their doorposts.
In the New Testament, Herod the Great also seized control of biological destiny in a parallel scene, when all the young children in Bethlehem were slaughtered.
I am not a theologian, but I believe the standard interpretation is that we are supposed to imitate the Hebrew rather than the Egyptian in this tale.
” If humanity is to advance and not stagnate unto catastrophe (as it seems to be currently headed towards), then eugenics must become part of the answer. The hordes of third-world mediocrities must be (mostly) sloughed off in the most compassionate way in order to make room for a future and more advanced kind of man. It is biological responsibility. It is responsibility to the balance of life on this planet. It is a good and noble thing, and not adverse to Christian love.”
Holy Biological Responsibility, Batman! You mean that humanity might (shudder) stagnate unless we take drastic yet compassionate steps to sterilize the unfit?
Praytell, what would a stagnant humanity look like, and why such a fate to be feared? Would stagnation perhaps include a morally dead society where acts of mega-scale brutality were coldly contemplated in the name of compassion? Because if not, the threat of stagnation is far less to be feared than the threat of the eugenic regime proposed to cure it.
Ascendant follows it up with this little tidbit of pure evil:
“And when the inferior biological endowment out-breeds the world’s resources, as always happens, I will likewise have the right to exterminate them.”
Got it. Christian Love = Exterminate the Inferior. This is the Dalek version of Christianity, no doubt.
It is a version of Christianity reserved only for those conscious (supposedly he means “conscientious”) enough to be willing to sacrifice the weak for the sake of the Great Goddess Mother Earth. The Old Testament fulminations against sacrificing people to pagan idols evidently make no deep impression on this allegedly Christian soul.
The reference to the “more advanced kind of man” does not seem, at first glance, to be in keeping with the Apostles like Peter, a stinky fisherman, or with Saints like Francis of Assisi, a mendicant. It seems to be more in keeping with figures like Doc Savage or the Gray Lensman or Kal-El of Krypton: who, unfortunately, are characters in make believe adventures stories written for boys.
I am not very familiar with the career of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but it is my belief that she washed the sores of lepers found dying in the gutters, where the dead were left out like dung in the field to die and rot in the sun. I am unaware whether she, in accord with enlightened eugenic principles, inquired whether the souls she soothed as they died were of the “more advanced” or the “less advanced” kind.
The Seven Last words Christ spoke from the Cross as he died in lingering and unimaginable agony for our sins, do not, according to the Gospel record we have, include that Our Lord groaned, after saying “I thirst!” but before he said “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the words, “And work a Final Solution on the Ethiopians before they use up too much oil and coal!” No, the commandment to commit mass murder of inferior breeding stock in the name of resource conservation must come from the Epistles, or another part of the Good Book.
Since the part of the world scheduled for genocide includes Catholic South America, Nestorian and Coptic North Africa, and places where celebrants of the Syriac and Orthodox Church reside, the burgeoning Church in Africa, and might include (depending where we draw the boundaries of the “Third World”) not only the Holy Land, but also the Oriental lands from whence hails my adopted daughter, I actually take the suggestion that all these people be killed rather personally.
Those scheduled for livestock breeding and extermination by the more advanced kind include fellow human beings, but also fellow Christians, fellow Catholics, friends of mine, and members of my immediate and extended family. (Having not consulted eugenic principles, one of my brothers married a woman of a non-white race).
A reader named John Hutchins, a man with a sound conscience, who is not a member of the Culture of Death, takes “Ascendant” to task for his advocating genocide, and calls him crazy.
Ascendant responds:
“I advocate a humane form of eugenics to prevent said future genocide/ethnic cleansing. I am the sane one proposing sane solutions. Are you sure you’re not the one who is crazy?”
Ah, those sane and realistic solutions proposed by those who fret about realistic and pressing problems! But of course population growth will outstrip resources! Paul Ehrlich estimates that the Indian subcontinent will be devastated by 1980 unless something is done now, and the British Isles be uninhabited by the year 2000; and I believe Malthus predicted mass starvation throughout Europe by 1799, so clearly there is no time to waste to implement a sane and realistic policy to avert the coming calamity!
After all, the deadline for doom is between ten to two hundred years in our past!
Let us pause to consult the intellects of the floating island of Laputa, who, being even more intelligent than Ascendant (not to mention more aetherially ascended) are concerned with even more sane and realistic calamities. That most honest of travelers, Lemuel Gulliver, whose sanity we have no cause to doubt, reports in these particulars:
These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minutes peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us. …
They are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehensions of these, and the like impending dangers, that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor have any relish for the common pleasures and amusements of life. When they meet an acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun’s health, how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet.
A digression:
Here is a why, when I converted, I converted to Catholicism. I found, first, that before Henry VIII, all Christians held that divorce was forbidden except in case of unchastity, so the practice from time immemorial of ditching and dispossessing a old wife for a younger, for a time, in Christendom, was abated, if not abolished. That practice has since re-emerged.
Second I found that, as recently as the 1930’s it was not just those zany Catholics, but all mainstream denominations, who forbade the use of contraception as a grave moral evil. Obviously, there had been no new revelation from God nor change in the theological implications of contraception; no wording in the Bible had evolved nor altered, particularly not in the Bibles of those who believe Sola Scriptura.
Third, I realized how simply wise and sublimely wholesome the Catholic teaching about chastity and the integrity of marriage is.
It was when I was in China, and talking to my tour guide, a fine young man named Simon (his English name) that I had driven home between my eyes the true cost and the true horror of the One Child Policy.
I had heard it discussed theoretically before: but this was real, not theoretical.
A prerequisite for obtaining a marriage license was to vow loyalty to the One Child Policy. Abrogation of this vow meant loss of work license and health care, so violators can neither work nor visit doctors, hospitals, pharmacies.
The year came finally when Simon and his wife wanted to have a child, and he duly filled out the paperwork for permission. Without any forewarning, Simon was forbidden by an anonymous old she-bureaucrat from having sexual relations with his wife. He was told that, since the population levels in his province were above quota for that fiscal year, he had to send his wife back home to live with her mother, lest he be tempted to enjoy nuptial pleasures.
The next year he was allowed to resubmit his paperwork.
Simon told the story with the same air of worldly resignation that an American might use to tell about a long wait or some irksome delay at the Motor Vehicles Department. To him, it was just the normal thing.
I asked him if he had any brothers. He said no. I asked him if he had any cousins. He said no. I asked him if he has any uncles or aunts. He said no. The One Child Policy had been in effect long enough that the extended family, once the backbone of the oldest civilized culture in human history, that same extended family whose filial duties form the core of Confucianism, had been abolished by the secular power.
Of course, I had read sci-fi speculations about tightly controlled nightmare societies written by Orwell and Huxley. None of those Jeremiads however, had any depiction of a normal and well-meaning intelligent young bridegroom whose life had been reduced to the buglike indignity of a worker ant in an ant farm.
One thought emerged from my epiphany of horror at the degradation visited upon this fine and upstanding young man: If China were a traditionally Catholic culture, stubborn to uphold Catholic virtues, the abomination of desolation called the One Child Policy could never have taken root. The worldly powers would have been forced to neuter or destroy the Church first.
I submit is that any nation or peoples, even those who did not understand and did not care to understand the philosophical and theological reasoning underpinning the basic Catholic teachings would be not only unwilling, they would be unable, to live under the regime of the totalitarians and Utopian monsters who want the state to compel and control which mommies get to have babies and which do not.
You see, you cannot have a Chinese-style “One Child Policy” with its mass abortions of girl babies, if the dominant majority of married couples and doctors obeyed the Catholic prohibition against contraception, sterilization, artificial insemination, and abortion. No Catholic mother would submit to them, and no Catholic doctor would perform them. There would simply be no mechanism to make a stubbornly Catholic nation submit to the One Child Policy.
This would be the case even if illiterate masses of superstitious commoners merely followed Catholic teaching by rote. The Church would still protect her children from this degradation and horror, and the blood of countless millions of innocent girl-babies would not dripping from their hands.
The Chinese, allowed only one child, abort girls to make room for boys, that their family name not die out. It is an expression of their right to choose: they choose live boys and dead girls.
I am not a Progressive nor a Liberal nor even a man with any particular affection for the modern world, but even I think this is a bit — what is that word? — “sexist.” If there has been an outcry among the Progressive and Liberals denouncing gender-based abortion, I have not heard it. One would think a program of misogynistic prenatal genocide would exasperate their high-mindedness. Perhaps they excuse the girl-killing on the grounds that misogyny is a Chinese tradition, merely one more rich tidbit in the stew of multi-culti diversity. — but then again, I am not pro-choice, because some choices are evil.
End of digression. I mention it because I see a parallel to the case here.
Consider: The fallen potentates, thrones, dominions, powers and angels of the Inferno inspire Ascendant and others like him to so despise their fellow man that daydreams of mass-enslavement seem unobjectionable, including daydreams of breeding men like cattle. That is what eugenics is.
Daydreams of holocausts and genocides and mass murders of the races Hell hates most, especially Jews, which Ascendant and the fallen angels inspiring his words trick him into call “lesser” and “inferior” also seem unobjectionable to him. That is what genocide is.
He calls it good stewardship of the planet. Sacrifice of humans so that the land be fertile is a practice of Moloch, and castration so that the land produce of Cybele. That is idolatry.
He assures us he is sane, and I, for one dislike the euphemism of calling a loyal devotion to abominable evil a mental disease. There is something too-innocently Socratic about the idea that all evil is due to ignorance or mental malfunction. Ascendant is not insane, he is arrogant and vicious.
The error is not a defect or abnormality in his reason, but in the abomination in his conscience, a combination of a bloated ego and a contempt akin to bloodthirstiness for persons of dignity equal and of blessedness superior to him, namely, the poor and dispossessed of the world, whom our Christ blessed in the Sermon on the Mount.
Not to mock Socrates, but this seems to be a case where had the patient been less educated, less exposed to the phosgene gas of Progressive intellectualism, and merely followed like a dumb sheep what every Sunday School boy learns at his mother’s knee, not only would his philosophy be sound, his conscience would still be alive.
Now, had Ascendant merely repeated by routine, even without understanding it, the teachings of the Catholic faith, his program of mass slavery and mass death, his malformed ego and malignant contempt for better men than he (and I here mean the poor and wretched of the world), could simply take no root.
The Catholic teaching requires the consent of the wife to wed, and, absent that consent, Caesar could not order who should marry whom; nor would married couples be able to be bred like dogs, since Christian marriage is monogamous, and Catholic marriage is lifelong; nor could the commands of some despot ordering children not to be born be carried out, since faithful Catholics eschew contraception and prenatal infanticide.
Obviously not just Catholics, but any Christian man or men of goodwill of any faith or philosophy serving in the army asked to carry out a genocide for the sake of getting the precious natural resources Ascendant a covets and wishes to steal from the poor and wretched, grinding the face of the poor and consuming their substance in the name of —
In the name of what?
— well, by the burning and scabby penis of the Dark Lord of Hell! Ascendant does not actually even bother to give a cover story or pretend any color of good motive for his proposed atrocity here, does he?
Ascendant merely makes the unsupported assertion that it is good to grind the faces of the poor into the mud, to kill the innocent in countless numbers, and to steal their stuff merely if and when his bloated and ghastly lust for possessions not his own should just so happen to convulse his greedy wee brain with a seizure, does he not?
There is something refreshing about such breathtakingly naked evil. One need not climb through the diseased thickets of elliptical doublespeak to get at the dark heart of the message.
Now, he is saying that out of compassion for the untermenschen, the master-race should impose human eugenic breeding and reproduction control, so that the untermenschen do not overbreed, and therefore bring upon themselves the armies of the master-race. The master race will reluctantly but firmly exterminate the Jews and Gypsies and Homos and Swarthy-men and useless eaters of bread.
Ah, we know from reading history that the Master Race is never motivated by avarice, pride, lust, or envy! No, indeed. The motives are pure: the trampling of the lesser breeds is ordained by Manifest Destiny and Historical Forces and Dynamic Realism and the Triumph of the Will to act as “gatherers and sharers” for Sharky and the other bosses, who are the disinterested and enlightened stewards of all the resources of the planet.
Ascendant is better than the rest of us, you see.
Odd how often this one idea, what we Christians call the Sin of Pride and name as the taproot of all other sins, seems always to crop up when some morally corrupt intellectual is advocating abandoning Christ in the name of the Great God Progress, or the Mother Goddess Earth.
I, for one, would be delighted with the irony when the Martians cylinders land on Horshell Common or perhaps Grover’s Mill New Jersey, and Beings clearly superior to Ascendant, using the exact same morally crippled reasoning he uses here, come to the conclusion that their remote and dying planet needs the resources of our green world. As good stewards of the resources, the Martians use their obvious superiority in organization, intelligence and science as an excuse to trample on his house with a tripodal war-machine, and gas his family with black smoke, and then burn his legs off slowly with their heat rays while he runs blubbering from the ruins, splattered with the blood of family members and sobbing hysterically.
The cold-eyed Martian could lean from the hood of its machine, explain that superior beings have a right to do what they will to inferiors, and then crush Ascendant (not so ascendant in this situation, alas) beneath the heavy black foot of a tripod machine leg as a man might crush a roach.
The image is a cruel one, yes, I admit: but there would be a sort of poetic justice to the scene.
Ascendant addresses me in a most comely fashion:
I absolutely encourage and laud your every intellectual inquiry and commitment to prose. I hope to read your sci-fi trilogy in the near future (on recommendation from friends).
These closing words I address to whomever is hiding behind the name Ascendant:
I regret that I answer courtesy with discourtesy, but, in this case, sir, please do not buy nor read my books.
You have deeply offended me at a very personal level, since I take your sneering at lesser races and “third-world mediocrities” of necessity to include my teenage daughter whom I love.
I do not need your custom; I am as reluctant to give you any entertainment as I am to take your money. I do not want to amuse you with my writing nor to win your praise or respect.
My father in law won the Purple Heart in World War Two and returned home with psychological scars that haunted him the rest of his life. He was one of the first American soldiers to find a death camp. He tore down the wall with his bare hands because he would not wait for the carpenter to come with proper tools to let the starving captives free.
His sacrifice and those of countless brave men was made in order that the ideas you propose would no longer be seriously contemplated by civilized men.
Out of honor for their memory, and as a civilized man, I want nothing to do with you until you abandon those ideas and repent of your arrogance, intellectual sloth, covetousness and idolatry.
Go to confession. You are covered with spiritual filth and need spiritual water to wash it clean. Until then, there can be no amity between us.
****************
Here ends the first response, meant for a fellow Christian. If it seems harsh, this is because Christians are obligated to correct each other.
Here is the my second answer, my reply if he is a not a Christian:
My dear sir, your attempt to defend eugenics as a civilized practice and to reconcile it to Christian teaching is an interesting intellectual exercise. I am unclear on one crucial point, however. Perhaps you can explain.
You say that goods stewardship of the planet and a due concern for the future require the contentious among us to seize control of biological destiny, and to prevent the mediocre in the third world from overbreeding. You say you have the right to exterminate them should they overbreed, since otherwise they imperil the planets resources, and may create shortages that may in turn lead to stagnation of our industrial progress.
The difficulty here is that you are in effect claiming a right to invade the rights of others. You do not claim the third world threatens your life, merely threatens to use up resources and create stagnation, which (I assume) you take as a threat to the richness of your life.
I am unclear how your right to a good life creates in you the right to abolish the rights of others to live their lives at all? How does your right to a good life grant you the right to control their love affairs, marriages and births, or to end their lives by extermination if they resist?
Logically, you cannot have a “right” to trample the rights of others.
Your alleged right to exterminate others because they threaten the richness of your life must logically be inferior to their right to live at all, richly or poorly.
For otherwise you are simply recommending committing murder to achieve wealth, or loot: the creed of a pirate.
Even taken in a light most favorable to your argument, your fears of stagnation are premature. We are currently suffering from underpopulation, not overpopulation.
And having a high population in and of itself does not create poverty and stagnation; it is having a high population under a socialist regime that creates poverty. Under socialism, every new birth is a new mouth to feed.
A high population under a free market is a benefit and not a detriment, because it lowers wage rate and lowers the marginal costs of goods and services even more. Under a capitalist democracy, every new birth is a new pair of hands to work.
Therefore if the stagnation you fear were indeed a justification for the First World to invade the Third, the only thing required would be regime change, shooting a few despots and warlords, but not a universal program of national, local, and municipal eugenics to count and approve each and every pregnancy of every native.
****************
If, dear readers, to you the Christian response toward Eugenics and other evils seems far more harsh than the secular response, reflect on what this implies concerning the limited ability of philosophies that ignore true religion to denounce true evils.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
