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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38490 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Did you know that thinking incest is icky is just dumb prejudice based on nothing? I've had to trawl through some of the Father of Eugenics, Francis Galton's, essays and hoo boy. His point there is that there is just social prejudice against incest, without really a factual basis (brother and sister banging and having kids is no big deal, it only gets to be a big deal if you keep inbreeding) and so in the same way, harnessing the same social forces, we can make people frown on dysgenic marriages and treat them like incest!

The Nazis may have given eugenics a black eye, but all the attitudes were baked in from the start. Oooh, they didn't know about genetics? They got the idea of contaminating the pure bloodline wrong? Well back in the day the Eugenics enthusiasts had the same attitudes: all those incapables and lower class types breeding and having children and smothering the good bloodlines.

Galton loved him some statistics and worked out an entire classification system of "good to bad" for humans re: eugenic stock, and backed it up with his stats.

As it will be useful henceforth to distinguish these classes, I have used the capital or large letters R, S, T, U, V, for those above mediocrity and corresponding italic or small letters, r, s, t, u, v, for those below mediocrity, r being the counterpart of R, s of S, and so on.

The one point I will give Galton is that he was more interested in encouraging the 'good stock' to breed than trammeling the rights of the 'inferior stock', though he did think they should be encouraged not to marry etc. A lot more of the Eugenics types were way too interested in working out exactly what desert island they could lock all the undesirables up on so they would be removed from the gene pool:

Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this.

This is how you find the few really high-quality candidates for marriage and offspring:

Diplomas.—It will be remembered that Mr. Booth’s classification did not help us beyond classes higher than S in civic worth. If a strong and widely felt desire should arise to discover young men whose position was of the V, W or X order, there would not be much difficulty in doing so. Let us imagine, for a moment, what might be done in any great University, where the students are in continual competition in studies, in athletics, or in public meetings, and where their characters are publicly known to associates and to tutors. Before attempting to make a selection, acceptable definitions of civic worth would have to be made in alternative terms, for there are many forms of civic worth. The number of men of the V, W or X classes whom the University was qualified to contribute annually must also be ascertained. As was said, the proportion in the general population of the V class to the remainder is as 1 to 300, and that of the W class as 1 in 3000. But students are a somewhat selected body because the cleverest youths, in a scholastic sense, usually find their way to Universities. A considerably high level, both intellectually and physically, would be required as a qualification for candidature. The limited number who had not been automatically weeded away by this condition might be submitted in some appropriate way to the independent votes of fellow-students on the one hand, and of tutors on the other, whose ideals of character and merit necessarily differ. This ordeal would reduce the possible winners to a very small number, out of which an independent committee might be trusted to make the ultimate selection. They would be guided by personal interviews. They would take into consideration all favourable points in the family histories of the candidates, giving appropriate hereditary weight to each. Probably they would agree to pass over unfavourable points, unless they were notorious and flagrant, owing to the great difficulty of ascertaining the real truth about them. Ample experience in making selections has been acquired even by scientific societies, most of which work well, including perhaps the award of their medals, which the fortunate recipients at least are tempted to consider judicious. The opportunities for selecting women in this way are unfortunately fewer, owing to the smaller number of female students between whom comparisons might be made on equal terms. In the selection of women, when nothing is known of their athletic proficiency, it would be especially necessary to pass a high and careful medical examination ; and as their personal qualities do not usually admit of being tested so thoroughly as those of men, it would be necessary to lay all the more stress on hereditary family qualities, including those of fertility and prepotency.

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