The eugenics movement has a long history, and now it is easy to find its influence everywhere. For example, one of the most popular tabletop magazines in the country, National Geographic, is regularly loaded with eugenics propaganda. The beautiful pictures in the familiar yellow-bordered cover are everywhere. Every month, millions of people read articles describing problems that would be fixed by population control. People read the articles, enjoy them, and keep them for years — rarely if ever noticing that they are taking poison!
One of the clearest examples of eugenics in National Geographic was an article in 1991 about elephants. It described how poachers have been killing the huge and fascinating animals just to get their tusks, leaving the carcasses to rot. The article is full of information, easy to read, well illustrated — really delightful. But if you take time to look at it critically, there are glaring problems everywhere. And when you see them, you wonder how you missed them at first, and why no one else saw them. In fact, you might wonder why there aren't any protesters picketing in front of National Geographic's offices.
The article is racist. There are four pictures in the article of people who kill elephants. In two, the people are white, and they are called "hunters" or "marksmen" who are culling the herd. In two, the people are black, and they are called "poachers."
The article starts out talking about poachers, and draws readers to sympathize with the victimized elephants. In fact, in one photo, there are armed men jumping out of a helicopter and killing the poachers. But as the article goes on, it turns out that elephants have an enemy even more dangerous than poachers — the growing human population. Elephants in the wild need a lot or room, and they are being crowded out by people. Surely, if it makes sense to kill people to protect elephants, it also makes sense to keep the population down to protect them.
There is a map that shows how much space the elephants need to live properly. It is a little less than a quarter of the continent of Africa. Does that mean that all the African people should vacate a quarter of the continent? Not exactly. The ideal arrangement suggested in National Geographic is that a few natives should stay to work as servants when wealthy Europeans come there on safaris.
It is hard to believe how bad the article is until you see it for yourself. But once you do see it, then you start to notice that National Geographic is always describing the world as overpopulated, always links people with pollution, always paints humanity as a threat to the health of the earth.
Protecting elephants from poachers does not require population control throughout Africa. Elephants and humans can live together peacefully.
National Geographic is by no means the only magazine that pushes eugenics. Nearly every newspaper and magazine and news outlet does the same thing. The ideology of eugenics is deeply ingrained in American culture today, everywhere. It will stay there until people challenge it.
To see eugenics in the media, watch for stories about problems that would be fixed completely or partially by population control. With each story, ask yourself whether there are solutions other than population control.Eugenics in the Science Curriculum
In the summer of 1999, there was a battle in Kansas about how to teach science in the public schools. A school board subcommittee proposed standards that all the schools were to meet. The standards included teaching about evolution and natural selection, and some Christians who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible resisted. The fight between the two sides resembled the Scopes trial in many ways, including one-sided reporting of the event.
What people hear about the Scopes trial today is that Christians in Tennessee resisted teaching evolution. Almost no one today is aware that the book John Scopes used taught evolution — and eugenics, white supremacy, forced sterilization. In the same way, stories about the confrontation in Kansas reported that the Christians have a narrow agenda, but did not examine the proposal from the committee that wrote the science standards for the Kansas State Board of Education. That proposed curriculum included a great deal of eugenics — Malthusian doctrine, population propaganda and environmental extremism.
For example, in third and fourth grades, "All students will demonstrate an awareness of changes in the environment. Through classroom discussions, students can begin to recognize pollution as an environmental issue, scarcity as a resource issue, and crowded classrooms or schools as a population issue." This is sheer lunacy. Anyone who sees a population problem in Kansas is out of touch with reality. The educators who wrote this into the curriculum are fanatics who are deeply committed to a belief system that is not based on verifiable facts. It is not possible to defend this item by saying that students are supposed to recognize a population issue "in classrooms and schools," not elsewhere. Overall, Kansas is sparsely populated; if some school is crowded, that's a construction issue.
The committee proposed that students in the fifth through eighth grades learn: "When an area becomes overpopulated by a species, the environment will change due to the increased use of resources. Middle level students need opportunities to learn about concepts of carrying capacity. They need to gather evidence and analyze effects of human interactions with the environment." The "carrying capacity" of Kansas is substantial, and a better question might be, "How many continents can Kansas feed?"
The committee's proposed curriculum was uniformly critical of human interaction with the environment. Students were to learn that humans are altering parts of the ecosystem, and that "the changes may be detrimental to ecosystem function." This is certainly true as far as it goes, but it is unbalanced. Humans can improve the world in many ways — by farming that takes immense quantities of food from the ground, by gardening that arranges natural beauty in new ways, by architecture that lifts stone into the sky, by art and music and medicine (for humans and animals).
To discuss ways that humans damage the ecosystem — without any mention of the good humans do — is not honest, and therefore not science.
The proposed curriculum describes humans as "complex, soft machines that require many systems to operate properly." It pounds away at a distinction between things that are natural and things that are "human-made," but then describes humans simply as animals without ever looking at the ways in which we are different from animals. Are we part of the ecosystem or not? Do we belong here or not? The message of the curriculum seemed to be that we fit badly (if at all) on the earth, and we must tread lightly or we are trespassing.
The educational standards proposed by the science committee writing for the Kansas State Board of Education were based largely on the work of national organizations, the National Research Council (NRC) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The idea that humans are smart animals that pollute is likely to show up in every state's science curriculum.The Family Cap in Welfare Reform
In 1993, New Jersey was the pioneer in a controversial experiment in welfare reform. Throughout the country, at the state and national levels, there was a push to reform a system for helping the poor that had grown unwieldy. Most of the reform was aimed at breaking the habit of depending on the government, and moving people from welfare to work — just getting people back to work. But one relatively minor piece of welfare reform — in New Jersey and elsewhere later — was a provision called the "family cap."
The family cap was supposed to be a response to the numbers of children who were born to single mothers on welfare. It ended the practice of automatically increasing benefits whenever another child was born. Proponents of the family cap said that the old system had rewarded the wrong behavior, and had encouraged "illegitimacy."
The amount of money involved was small. It varied from state to state, but in general a woman receiving help from the government would get cash, rent assistance, food stamps and medical care adding up to about $20,000 each year. For each child she had, she would receive an additional $1,000 per year, or a five percent increase. The family cap did not change the additional benefits that a woman received for children who were already alive; it affected children yet to come. A woman would not receive additional benefits if the child was conceived and born while she was on welfare.
The clear intent of the family cap was to discourage women from having more children while the mother was unmarried and dependent on the state. It was supposed to change her behavior. But it was not clear how she was supposed to avoid having more children, or what behavior she was supposed to change. Did the social planners want her to use barrier contraception, or modern birth control methods like Norplant and Depo-Provera, or get sterilized, or get an abortion if she became pregnant, or be chaste? The message of the family cap provision was not specific; she was just supposed to avoid more births.
In the event, the birth rate for women on welfare in New Jersey did in fact drop. But why? The number of surgical abortions did not change much. The Population Council and Wyeth-Ayerst, a drug company, promoted Norplant in New Jersey very aggressively, but it did not catch on. Depo-Provera did become very popular, though, and probably explains the decline.
When the family cap provision was debated at the national level in 1996, an odd thing happened. Pro-lifers were divided on the idea. Some opposed it because it might encourage women to have abortions, or because they had been telling pregnant women for decades that the pro-life movement was ready to help a pregnant mother in need with no strings attached. But others supported it as a "pro-family" law that would "fight illegitimacy."
The intent of the law was to drive down births among people on the margins of society. The arguments for the law sounded like Margaret Sanger's hostility to welfare. Champions of the law included Charles Murray, author of the eugenics update, The Bell Curve. The result of the law was to increase chemical abortions via Depo-Provera. If pro-lifers could support the family cap, then clearly the eugenics movement is alive and well!
Locating and understanding eugenics in modern politics can be a little frustrating, since everyone resists the "eugenics" label, and because many of the people now pushing eugenics proposals are doing so without any clear understanding of what they are doing. But in general, look for eugenics whenever a law is supposed to drive down the birthrate of the poor.Eugenics Resurgence at Princeton
At the beginning of the 20th century, the London School of Economics laid the foundations for generations of eugenics theory, guaranteeing that anyone who studied economics or indeed any social science in English in this century would be taught eugenics. Today, there is a massive resurgence of eugenics, with little organized opposition. One institution that is especially worth watching is Princeton University, which could become a focal point like the London School of Economics, with a number of overlapping eugenics programs and initiatives.
Princeton, like most of the Ivy League schools, has a long history of involvement in eugenics. For example, Dr. Carl C. Brigham was among the leaders in the use of intelligence tests to screen out immigrants in the 1920s; he taught psychology at Princeton at the time.
Princeton took a leadership role in negative eugenics when the Osborn and Milbank families helped to fund the Office of Population Research (OPR) there. (The Osborn family includes Major General Frederick Osborn, the postwar "reformer"; the Milbank Fund provided the money for the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.) OPR was extremely influential in shaping American foreign policy regarding population. Today, OPR is housed in Notestein Hall, named for Frank Notestein, who promoted population control through the Milbank Foundation as a researcher, the Population Council as a founding trustee and later president for nine years, and the United Nations Population Division as the Director. Princeton remains deeply committed to population control.
When President Clinton launched his National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), he appointed Harold Shapiro as chairman. Shapiro, a calm and urbane leader, is president of Princeton University. As chair of the NBAC, Shapiro was in a position to shape the debate over human cloning, and must take a major share of responsibility for the commission's "clone-and-kill" recommendation (proceed with somatic cell nuclear transfer, but kill the human embryos before they become recognizable to the naked eye).
In 1998, Shapiro gave the opening talk at an international bioethics conference in Tokyo, and called for an "aggressive, serious conversation" between bioethics and social sciences — but not between bioethics and theology. By "aggressive, serious conversation," he meant an exchange of views that was vigorous, with ideas put forward with some passion, with a real intent of changing the way people think. If social scientists follow Shapiro's proposal, that could strengthen the eugenics movement in the academic world.
When Shapiro spoke in Tokyo, he had already begun to implement his own proposal at Princeton, by bringing in animal-rights activist Peter Singer to teach there. Singer was the founder of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB), which sponsored the Tokyo meeting. The IAB takes no official position on any matter of substance; rather, it offers itself as a forum for a free exchange of ideas. The only position that the IAB takes is opposition to censorship.
Singer himself is forthright and aggressive in his view that intelligence is the quality that matters most, and that some apes have more intelligence than some humans — and are therefore more worthy of legal protection. He supports infanticide for eugenic purposes. Some critics have responded to his proposals by trying to censor them, which is a little like throwing Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch.
Shapiro's call for an aggressive conversation will encourage social scientists — especially Princeton professors — to consider how to incorporate Singer's views into their work.
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| This is a not a scientific survey; the sample is far too small to prove anything statistically. But many people can see in their own families that average family size has declined. There are many personal and specific reasons for this — always interesting, sometimes painful. But sometimes, people can look in their own families and see one major effect of the eugenics movement. Overall, family size has declined, because of population explosion propaganda. This is not a criticism of your parents; the point is that you need not look far to find the effects of eugenics. |
1. National Geographic magazine describes two threats to elephants. What are the two threats, which is most serious, and what is their solution?
2. Describe the Malthusian and eugenicist ideas found in the science standards proposed by the science committee writing for the Kansas State Board of Education.
3. What is the "family cap"? What is it for, and how is success measured?
4. Identify Peter Singer, Frank Notestein and Harold Shapiro. Explain the phrase "aggressive serious conversation."
5. Compare family size over three generations. How many brothers and sisters do you have? How many first cousins do you have? How many siblings did your father have, and how many did your mother have? How many siblings did each of your grandparents have? Is there a trend?
Discuss: Can Princeton University promote eugenics as effectively as the London School of Economics did?
How many children did your parents have? Include yourself, brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters.