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It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
They don't, though. Or rather, they do in cases where society has attached the word "eugenics" to a particular activity, but primarily a matter of social signaling. I cannot think of a more obviously eugenic practice than elective abortion; "the time is not right to have a child" or "this child is genetically defective and so I will terminate the pregnancy" is an extremely eugenic decision, and of course abortion is a keystone of American leftist politics. Virtually every human I know is at least weakly, and often strongly, eugenic in every way that makes any practical difference. Progressives have always loved eugenics, and still do; they just hate the word and its historical associations.
In particular, a progressive is far more likely to abort a Down syndrome baby than a conservative. In some especially progressive parts of the world, Down syndrome has essentially been eliminated via elective abortion. I admit that I regard most cries of "ableism" as fundamentally unserious for this and other reasons (like the progressive advocacy of assisted suicide for non-terminal and/or psychiatric maladies). You have to separate the signaling from the substance, though.
Even if, say, their children turn out to cause a crime wave? Surely that can't be right. Anyway you're not entirely mistaken, but the case is essentially overdetermined here.
Sure, but it's important to notice the difference between tabooing a word and certain specific historical examples, and actually disavowing a concept. Eugenics remains a fundamentally progressive idea; progressives just stopped calling it that. This is a very common approach to progressivism, shedding unpopular names for things while keeping their practical substance intact (see e.g. "cultural Marxism").
I think you’re totally misunderstanding the motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion.
Eugenics requires perceiving oneself and one’s progeny as part of a larger biological project - as merely one tiny branch of the human genetic/ancestral tree, the long-term health of which requires careful and intentional cultivation. Eugenics is a fundamentally communitarian endeavor. It’s about wanting humanity as a whole to be improved, using individual instantiations of eugenic breeding/sorting to direct the overall genetic health of the population in the direction of iterated improvement.
A middle-class American progressive woman who aborts a fetus with Down Syndrome is not thinking like this at all. Her decision could be framed in two ways: one is as a purely selfish decision - “If I have to raise a massively burdensome and defective child for the rest of my life, it will be financially catastrophic, require massive amounts of resources and effort, and will substantially decrease my quality of life.”; the other is to see it as an act of mercy for that child - “It would be better not to be born at all, than to be born as an incurably defective and mentally/physically retarded person, incapable of independence and entirely dependent on the indulgence of others for my entire life.”
Neither of these require, or in fact in any way involve, any orientation toward how your decision to abort a child ties into the larger genetic health of other future humans. Many of these women are some of the smartest and most capable individuals in our society; if they were primarily motivated by eugenic thinking, why on earth would they be deciding against perpetuating their superior genetic stock just because “it’s not the right time for me personally”? Abortion is clearly the dysgenic course of action in that case, barring fetal abnormalities.
The motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion was not the point, there. The point was that progressives do not oppose eugenics per se; practices of a eugenic character are in no need of special particular motivational states in order to be eugenic practices.
So, yes, if we're talking on a personal level about individual motivations, the science of "improving stock" (as Galton put it) is something individuals are not necessarily thinking about when they make decisions of a eugenic nature. But this was a discussion about policy, and I was responding to someone else who suggested that progressives oppose eugenics, which is simply not true. Progressives are fine with a wide array of eugenic practices, so long as people don't talk about the eugenic character of those practices (especially, while using the word "eugenics").
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This still qualifies as eugenics. Eugenics doesn't have to be about "humanity as a whole". You can think about eugenics on the level of a single person.
But how is this eugenics specifically? Yes, Down Syndrome in particular is a genetic condition, but what about aborting a fetus with any other sort of detectable congenital condition, i.e. hydrocephaly, missing limbs, etc.? I think that these are all motivated fundamentally on a recognition that some people’s lives are doomed from the very start to be unpleasant, short, or burdensome, and that if one had the ability to spare such people a life of suffering and extreme adversity, it is morally correct, or at least permissible, to do so. I think it’s coming from a totally different perspective than progressive eugenics proper.
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