Eugenics is a grim reality, but I find that understanding it clearly is a source of great joy and hope. For nearly everyone, to see it clearly is to reject it firmly.
In the 20th century, there were huge struggles against Fascism and then against Communism, and both were swept away. Holdouts remain, but the future will not be shaped by these anti-human ideologies. Eugenics will also be swept away. It has done as much damage as Fascism and Communism; it has a longer history and a tighter grip. But it too will fall. It cannot keep the allegiance of intellectuals, because it is based on nonsense. And it cannot maintain the support of anyone else either, because it is joyless.
Consider the human dilemma as described by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson:
We keep returning to the subject with a sense of hesitancy and even dread. For if the brain is a machine of ten million nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect — we are biological and our souls cannot fly free. If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, [then] genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species. ... However much we may embellish that stark conclusion with metaphor and imagery, it remains the philosophical legacy of the last century of scientific research.Wilson's physics and astronomy are relics of the 19th century; he is wrong about the philosophical legacy of science. Astronomers are not troubled by a Creator, and physics since Heisenberg has room for human freedom. It is only biologists, out of touch with physics, who still think that faith and science may be in conflict. Religion is at peace with science, except with biology as it is taught by eugenicists. The truth will come out, and perhaps in just a few years.
Wilson's description of humanity is degrading, enslaving and joyless (as well as wrong). To his credit, he recognizes that it is "admittedly unappealing."
It is interesting to look at the careers of two men who examined human nature with a scientific bent. Alfred Kinsey, whose writing helped launch the sexual revolution, was raised as a Christian, but in college he came under the influence of eugenicists, including the Huxleys. Then he spent his life studying sex, but without joy.
Walker Percy, one of the great novelists of the century, was also shaped for years by eugenics. He was especially impressed by the sweeping vision of the universe painted by H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley in The Science of Life. But Percy later rejected eugenics. He was a physician and an observer of humanity, skeptical and ready to listen to science, but he came to see that science cannot explain the glorious tangle of the human mind. He converted to Catholicism. When you recognize eugenics, you find that Percy's novels are full of blistering satires of the joyless ideology of arrogance.
The contrast between the joy of the believer and the joylessness of the materialist is easy to see. Kinsey's biographer records an incident when Kinsey corrected his son's religious bent. The innocent little boy said, "Look at the pretty flower, Daddy. God made it." "Now, Bruce," dad replied, where did the flower really come from?" Bruce knew the right answer: "From a seed." The implication, notes Judith A. Reisman, "is that if one believes in God, one cannot believe in seeds."
The poet Piet Hein certainly knew about the existence of seeds (and bulbs), but noted:
Brown earthThe truth will prevail, and eugenics will be swept away with the other bloody failures of the 20th century. Freedom and dignity are not illusions. Human life is a great gift from a loving God, and it is full of wonder and awe and joy.
To yellow crocus
Is undiluted
Hocus-pocus.
Is genocide implicit in the theory of natural selection? Will eugenics always lead to massive bloodshed?
Read over the Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55), and then write an imaginary conversation about it between a eugenicist and a Christian. (The simplest way to structure the conversation is to go through the Magnificat line by line, responding to each line with a sentence or two from each side.)
Locate eugenics theory in a chapter of any standard social science textbook, and explain what would change in the book if the taint of eugenics were replaced with an unswerving commitment to the overwhelming dignity of each person.
