The Roots of Eugenics and the Hope of Dignity
The eugenics movement is traditionally categorized in terms of the positive and negative. For example, “positive” eugenics in the United States included practices such as encouraging the reproduction of the “fittest” human specimens, celebrating the “fittest babies,” and trying to find—via Francis Galton’s IQ test and other measures—the “fittest” humans. On the other hand, “negative” eugenics included forced sterilization laws, anti-miscegenation laws, forced birth control, forced abortions, scientific experiments on Black and other non-white communities, and forced attendance to residential schools for indigenous populations. Most people who supported positive eugenics also supported at least some of the negative eugenic practices. Once the Nazi regime took up the cause, the so-called negative eugenics spiraled into mass murder and genocide, making the so-called positive eugenic applications in other countries seem downright peaceful.
Francis Galton, mid-nineteenth century
This trend has seemingly to continue through today, where eugenic-related organizations are pushing our world strongly into the realm of Gattaca. Orchid, for example, is one of multiple medical start-ups already cashing in on the combination of genetic testing and IVF. Meanwhile MassMutual is starting to roll out genetic testing for better life insurance rates. The genetic testing global market is worth billions and rising, with companies like 23andMe selling “total health” packages, which include long disclaimers explaining that the science is not, in fact, predictive and that all the statistical correlations they will show you hold no guarantee of predictive health. While much of modern genetic testing is like selling snake oil, monogenic testing and embryonic selection is a real and present practice at some IVF facilities, with parents able to create multiple embryos, perform full genetic tests, and then choose the embryo which meets their preferred criteria. This, while not part of a global eugenics program, is a clear descendent of eugenic practices.
But why bring up eugenics at all? What is so wrong about wanting healthy babies and hoping for some future where all the fuzzy science is clear? This was the same argument post–WWII, when the word eugenics fell darkly out of fashion but many aspects of eugenics remained popular, such as population fears, forced sterilizations, and racist prohibitions of miscegenation. This was the danger of separating negative eugenics from positive, because marking any part of the eugenics movement as positive reduces the ethical discussion of the overall movement, obscures the connections between those who practiced so-called positive and negative eugenics, and masks the underlying unethical philosophy that birthed eugenics in the first place. If one fails to see the underlying evil of assigning human biological perfection and only declares the practices of so-called negative eugenics as evil, it is difficult to argue that the positive eugenic practices were harmful in and of themselves. But once we accept the underlying causes, analyze the historical antecedents, and see the contributing, intersecting philosophies, both the positive and negative practices can be understood as unethical and part of a larger whole.
Eugenics is best understood as the progeny of two older philosophies: early modern scientific anthropology and cultural progressivism. People versed in these philosophies would find a unified purpose in a specific interpretation of Darwin’s theory of biological evolutionary development by natural selection. That purpose would be called eugenics. Early modern anthropology emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when natural philosophers used taxonomic systems to describe a divided, hierarchical humanity. These taxonomies were based upon culture, cranial measurements, and outward appearance. It took about a century for the sciences of the elite European communities to fully concretize the incipient racist attitudes of these taxonomies, which placed white Europeans higher and placed African and other non-white Indigenous populations lower in the hierarchy. Many of the men known for their racist anthropologies, like Carl Linnaeus and Johann Blumenbach, were also known for their groundbreaking work in general taxonomy, producing systematic animal and plant taxonomies that would last for centuries in the scientific education system.
A second philosophical argument, generally known as cultural progressivism, would also prove essential for eugenics. Cultural progressivism refers to philosophies of cultural, scientific, and religious progress championed by European philosophers during the same time period as Linnaeus and Blumenbach, which overwhelmingly placed white, Christian, European men as the most advanced humans on the planet. Progressivism is different from anthropology in that it argued that the development of culture itself was a moral good, and that the benefits of science and technology were God-given miracles that proved the moral righteousness of European, and eventually, American culture. This idea had been around for centuries, but was seized upon most by a number of philosophers in the early seventeenth century who coined the term “the scientific revolution.”
Francis Bacon and others, beginning in the early 1600s, observed the drastic changes in the world that had begun the previous century—the colonization of the Americas, the printing press, the beginning of chattel slavery on a massive scale, the Reformation and religious wars, and the booming of universities as standard models of education—and saw an opportunity for better and more stable funding for scientific pursuits as a whole. Francis Bacon was a public, progressive English gentleman who argued tirelessly for better education, better sciences, and a better society.
Francis Bacon by Paul van Somer I (1617)
Bacon’s notion of the new science was empirical, anti-philosophical, and decidedly European. In 1620, he wrote, “all the present sciences are useless for discoveries,” and the present system of logic is useless. Bacon’s groundbreaking ideas were not unique to him, as the idea of scientific inductive and experimental methods were praised and employed by Galileo and others around the same time. But Bacon joined a chorus of men aligning this new method with the cultural revolutions of the day, and claiming that all old science was irrelevant and all new science was progress. Bacon chose the moment well, as the scientific discoveries produced during and directly after his life were revolutionary. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler forever changed how humanity saw the universe, and Isaac Newton, just a few decades later, forever changed the understanding of physics. Who could claim Bacon was wrong when such ideas blossomed?
In the land of freedom and progress known as the United States, Thomas Jefferson ranked Bacon “as one of the greatest humans to ever live, along with Locke and Newton.” In the nineteenth century, when eugenics would be developed, the ideas of Francis Bacon were used, historian Herbert Hovenkamp writes, “like a weapon to guard against anything irrational, anything theological, or anything that might push against the new religion of modern science or the new moral certainty of progress.” He is one key example from the many well-known philosophers— such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill—who in various and complex ways contributed to and developed this notion of cultural and technological progress.
The technological, intellectual, and scientific advancements of the seventeenth century seemed to confirm that European culture (and by extension, colonial North American) had the highest of all human cultures. For many white, educated, and elite men of Europe and the United States, equipped with power, wealth, and seemingly endless opportunity, the nineteenth century was a lot like the seventeenth—a time of revolutions and opportunity. Armed with Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis instead of heliocentrism, it was also a time to fulfill Francis Bacon’s dream of the enslavement of Nature herself, and to create, at last, a great race of humanity.
In telling the history of eugenics, we could, of course, go back further. Selective breeding programs have been around at least since Plato, who suggested breeding controlled by the state in the Republic, and multiple ancient civilizations practiced infanticide on seemingly weaker children. Misogyny had existed for millennia before it was tied to hierarchical anthropological arguments, and while modern racism largely coincided with chattel slavery, xenophobic biases have existed for ages. Yet eugenics, on its face, is the dangerous combination of the worst of these vices. The selective breeding programs of old, much like the IVF embryonic selection programs of today, continue the ancient tradition of ableism and pseudoscience, while the misogyny and xenophobia that can be found in racist anthropologies have continued to fuel new vices and political movements well into the twenty-first century. In other words, these factors alone did not uniquely give rise to the particularly devastating scientific and political program of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known as eugenics. Eugenics was born in a particular place and at a particular time due to a combination of many causes. But philosophically, it can be directly tied to the racist anthropologies and cultural progressivism of the previous two centuries.
Clarifying the undergirding philosophies of the eugenics movement allows for further ethical clarity in assessing the historical dimensions of eugenics. We can no more easily remove the ableism, racism, and misogyny from eugenics than we can remove the antisemitism from the Nazi party. People will always try to marry off their children well and will always hope for healthy children, but such things support the dignity of humanity, affirming that each life deserves hope, health, and love. Eugenics, in all its modern forms, undercuts the dignity of a single human life in favor of a biased view of some ideal, perfect human society—a society that can never be stripped of its racist, ableist, antisemitic, and misogynistic past. Either humanity, and thus each and every human, has dignity in its current state, or it, and by extension we, can never claim to have, or give, dignity.
John P. Slattery is the director of the Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law at Duquesne University.