What is eugenics?

Most people seem to think that eugenics is a cruel method of getting rid of disabled and diseased people, and is typified by the Nazi death camps.

This is like thinking that patriotism is a method of getting rid of other people beside one's own.

'Eugenics' was the name invented by Francis Galton for the aim of making the next generations 'better' than the present. Eugenics meant "Well-born, or born well, the science of improving offspring". Dysgenics meant "Messing up eugenics to increase the suffering in the world" (My definition).

Eugenics can operate on three levels – nature, breeding and care of animals, and human care of the next human generation.

In nature, without human intervention, predators enforce eugenics. They prey upon the weak, elderly and infirm of a species, so that it is predators that keep the species in a state of best fitness to survive. For example, the lions as predators of the African animals that race in herds before them, keep those herds full of the fittest to out-run them, by taking out all the weakest who cannot run so fast.

The humans who tend animals that we eat for our food use eugenic principles that eliminate the weak, diseased and infirm. We cherish the animals most fit for our purposes and breed from them so that the stock for our food improves. We also breed animals for shows with criteria for those shows – for example, pedigree dogs.

In the past, nature and the human race itself rigorously kept itself free from survival of the weakest and diseased humans. Infanticide and death by disease kept the weaker from reproducing. The practice of war tended to weed out the weakest. We could see how it happened until recently, so that African tribes kept their numbers low.

Human populations can be changed by changes in health, education and above all, by culture. Which way are we changing it today? Nowadays we are not keeping those eugenic principles.

Compassion has brought mercy to keep alive the weakest of the humans. Hospitals and foreign medical missionaries help the weakest to reproduce. Our wars have sent the best of our young men to die young. Our laws of welfare ensure that most of the children of the unfit, and the weak and premature babies, now can survive.

The most intelligent humans use family planning and contraception and have fewer children than those who are less intelligent.

The charities that work in developing countries use pictures of mothers with eight children to appeal for money to save them. Refugees come with pregnant mothers and young families and seek to have more children to ensure their families survive.

Instead of cultural changes, scientists are venturing into the transhuman, transhumanism and neo-eugenics, seeking spectacular advances to remedy the design flaws in human beings by methods of human cloning, germ-line engineering, gene therapy and other genetic manipulations.

Anything good is liable to be ruined by what extremists do in its name, and thin ends of wedges become thick ends. It happens to religions, dreams of utopias, freedom and justice, and what people do with our most marvellous inventions. Well-meaning Francis Galton invented the word 'eugenics' to mean 'well-born' or born well, but bears some responsibility for linking it in the public mind with abuses of human rights, because his suggestions of possibilities of forced sterilisation or elimination of the 'less worthy' have been so abominably taken up.

Today undreamt of developments in what humans can do make the idea of promoting eugenics, 'good-born', once more relevant. There is unprecedented meddling with human biology, with bionics, genetic manipulations, cryonics, stem-cell research and forms of cloning, and new philosophies that go beyond humanism to 'transhumanism' and other risks to our humanity. These are dreams or nightmares that can only be produced with the financial and scientific dedication of a highly developed society. While these are being carried on by elites, other people elsewhere face enormous social and environmental problems, with unsustainably growing populations, devastated earth, and global malignity in wars that are fuelled by the developed world's massive research and profits in how to kill. At exactly the same time as human beings are behaving as if we were gods of life and death, human stupidity seems at a peak.

How oxymoronic can it be for military research to be provided with almost bottomless funding to develop wired-up soldiers and robot warriors that can replace live ones - while ordinary human beings remain stupid. Where can we find super-intelligence being devoted to no more war?

The Eugenics Society and its successor, the Galton Institute, which was renamed because of the Nazi meaning given to Eugenics, are widely maligned in web-sites and articles as seeking malignant ends through underhand means that are cloaked as benevolent. Some of this enmity comes from opposers of family planning and of permitting abortion as a last resort. Others believe that the Galton Society and allied conspirators ignore the dangers that may follow when science and technology are applied to modify the essence of what human beings are. 'Improving the human race' is still perceived as inevitably linked with ethnic cleansings and genocides to get rid of the undesirable. 'Evolutionary genocide' and 'Racial abyss' are among the terms that come up on Google trawls.

However, there are problems with laisser-faire attitudes to reproduction, and with beliefs such as that humans should not interfere in God's right to decide who is conceived, regardless of congenital or environmental handicaps. Multitudes of people are conceived with little chance in life constitutionally or environmentally.

It seems to me that Eugenics in its intended positive sense must establish clear affirmations of three human rights: -- The right of the living to exist, the right to reproduce, and the right of the living to the best possible chances of health, care and social justice, so that every child born that is capable of life does not face suffering or disability.

The right of the living to exist means that there is no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, and no claims that anyone's life is worth less than anyone else's. No war, no capital punishment, and no starvation. These rights place ethical priorities for the already-alive that any opposers of contraception or abortion must surely rate more highly than their concerns for the unconceived and the unborn.

The right to reproduce should be clearly stated. As world population surges out of control from six billion now to eight or ten billion by 2050 barring catastrophes, the right to have one child each (that is, two children per couple) can be regarded as fair and preferably established by a UN convention. That would remove any bases for fears or claims of genocide about all attempts to stabilise and eventually naturally reduce unsustainable populations. In countries with high child mortality, this right can be a minimum right, to allow for tragedies, so that there may be up to four children per couple. In other countries already with assured life for babies, one child each may be the maximum that the State can justifiably assist.

The right of adults to reproduce requires the concomitant right for every child, everywhere, to have the best possible chances of health, care and social justice.

What is to be done when a child is born with severe disabilities and continual suffering that our present knowledge cannot help, and which can lay upon a family a permanent burden it may not be able to bear? This issue can never be resolved in any easy way. There are arguments about 'thin ends of wedges' and the loss of potential Beethovens. But as a clinical child psychologist I have seen the later consequences of some 'heroic' medical efforts that saved severely damaged infants, and seen doctors regretting their earlier pride at brilliant rescues. 'Let be' can be more humane than hubris at what medicine can do to make the severely damaged surivive for a horrible existence. Let those who criticise a family's decision to 'let nature take its course', take and rear such a child themselves.

Millions more children are urgent cases to help. These are the children who miss out on their rights to love, care and social justice. Surely it must be made absolutely clear, that no adult or teenager has a right to casually beget or conceive children they do not want. They have no right to produce more than one child if they do not or cannot give their children these basic rights. Societies have obligations to ensure these basic rights to all children, and to support parents in being able to give that care. It is in their interests to do so. Societies pay a very high financial and social cost for all their members who are unnecessarily psychologically deprived and disturbed. Individuals pay the price in misery and helplessness.

Have parents still a right to reproduce when they deliberately continue self-destructive behavior such as drug abuse or alcoholism, risking babies born damaged or with developmental problems? There is an ethical and a practical question of whether the child's right is above the adults. Principles must not be made a 'thin end of a wedge', to judge 'Your children would not be as privileged as mine, so you deserve none.'

Most mothers do not want more children than they can cope with, for their own sake and for the children's sake. The present drivers for large families and larger populations need public identification and checking. Their reasons for seeking many children do not consider the interests of each child.

Large families are a delight – but in these times they are a privilege and not a right. They put stresses on sustainability, and research evidence is that children in large families can more often lack advantages – though this is by no means always the case. However, when families today must be small, we can still continue to enjoy a multitude of children together in communities and extended families, if our housing designs are planned to allow this.

Conclusion

As populations increasingly strain our resources, there will be those who will urge limiting measures such as to force other individuals to be barren, and to kill off the unwanted and those perceived to be inferior, in whatever way. The three basic rights of the living, to be enabled to survive decently, to reproduce, and to have decent childhood conditions to establish quality of life, are three rights that need to be set firmly now. And 'eugenics' includes how these rights can be ensured.

Eugenics has an urgent mission today to prevent humans being turned into less than they could be. The human race is not becoming super-men, but lesser-men, untermensch, who are unable to even try to be 'homo sapiens', to be wise humans who can find ways out of the man-made disasters that loom ahead.

The aim of 'well born' is a life of 'well-being'. A child born perfect, with an ideal conglomeration of genes, can still be damaged in its capacity to be really alive and operational. Our society tends to go in for ambulances, rather than prevention.

It might be expected in a century of increasingly complex technological marvels and their consequents that most people would be developing greater capacities for reason, to manage what we can invent and make.[1] Yet evidence is around us that most people behave less intelligently than they might – as we do ourselves.

The phrase 'dumbing-down' is so often flung around in partisan polemics that hearers can just shrug. Yet it is a phenomenon that calls for investigation as a significant change of intellectual climate. 'Dumbing-down' in a culture can be regarded as another sort of climate change. Its manifestations are a shift in the prevailing popular culture to

Dumbing down is a dysphemism for a perceived over-simplification of, amongst others, education, news and television.

Political and commercial interests benefit from mass cultùre that keeps people ignorant, apathetic, helpless and consùming, and prevents connected thinking, organized knowledge and co-operative action to stop injustices.

I am using it as the response, not what is done to people, but how they respond.

escapes and consolations should be 'regression in the service of the ego' as Freud put it – a temporary reversion to more childish behaviour that is accurately dscribed as recreation – re-creation.

In the past, social oppressions restricted the capacity of most of the human gene pool to throw up the most able to be upwardly mobile and operate effectively. The masses were usually kept down as serfs, bound to the situations they were born into. However, when people were given freedom in the modern age, the gene pools were able to produce a tremendous flourishing of talent and ability. One example is how the descendants of convicts sent to Australia made good with the opportunities in their new country.

Education has been regarded as the magic wand to develop everyone's potential. The welfare states have sought to give opportunity to everyone, supplying improved health and environmental conditions. But it has not worked out to produce all the anticipated results. There is still enormous waste of people. Much of it for the same old reasons. Still, awful conditions and misfortunes at any time from conception on can blight lives.

There are now other factors that can affect almost the whole of society, and that can be global factors. These are cultural. Since whingers and wowsers have consistently down the ages cried 'Wolf' about what the world is coming to, should we be at all concerned that a Wolf may eventually turn up?

We should look at the evidence.