… then it must be a duck.
Beginning today, my Philosophy of Race class will be learning about the first theorists of eugenics, an early 20th C. pseudo-science that (in the words of one of its founders and leading proponents, Sir Francis Galton) studied “all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.” The word “eugenics” derives from the Greek eu– (“good”) and genos- (“birth” or “origin”) and according to the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921 “eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.” Eugenics was a legitimate academic discipline in many colleges and universities up until the 1930’s when its normative goals and historical association with scientific racism caused it to decline in the esteem of bona fide scientists. Well, that and the fact that in the 1930’s Ernst Rüdin began incorporating eugenics rhetoric into the racial policies of Nazi Germany.
Although “official” theories of eugenics began with Galton (who actually first coined the term in his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development), the ideas subtending it stretch back much further. In fact, they stretch all the way back to Plato, who advocated his own variety of selective breeding in the Republic and believed that human reproduction should be a matter of government regulation and control. At lines 459d-e, Socrates says:
The best men must have intercourse with the best women as frequently as possible, and the opposite is true of the very inferior men and women; the offspring of the former must be reared, but not the offspring of the latter, if our herd is to be of the highest quality. Only the rulers should know these arrangements, if our herd of guardians is to avoid all dissension as far as possible.
One of the real challenges of teaching eugenics is that many students find Socrates’ view intuitively correct, even if they wouldn’t go so far as to advocate Socrates’ suggestion that elaborate and secret lotteries be introduced to cover-up the selective breeding. That is to say, the fundamental principle of eugenics– to do whatever possible to produce the “best stock” of human beings– appears to be a principle totally in sync with both enlightened self-interest and concern for the public good. We encourage science to do this all the time, don’t we? Isn’t this how we got antibiotics?
Disabusing people of the notion that eugenics was a “real” science requires not only a thorough grounding in the history of the concept of “race” but also a nuanced understanding of how truly “objective” scientific inquiry is compromised by hidden normative assumptions about what the object of its inquiry (in this case, the “human being”) is and what it ought to be. To that end, I think it is really unfortunate that there exists such a broad communicative abyss between scientists and philosophers these days. Sure, philosophers of science still ask the “meta-” questions, but the truth is that most real scientists don’t… and very few philosophers know (or care) enough about real science to ask, either.
Of course, I’m very happy that our new President has pledged to “restore science to its proper place,” by which he means, I think, very far away from pseudo-sciences like Intelligent Design. I worry that that restoration may be stymied if we do not ask why politically- and morally-grounded pseudo-sciences gain prominence in the first place. Good science explains for us something about the world that was previously mysterious or unknown, but so does pseudo-science. The (very recent) history of eugenics ought to be a textbook case here, illustrating the blind spots by which we are inclined to be betrayed when we look too hard for explanations of what is that fortify explanations of what we think ought to be.
Nice blog. What appears on the surface as intuitive, however, cannot be further from the truth. As you say “…many students find Socrates’ view intuitively correct.” But, indeed, the truth is quite counterintuitive. If the goal is to make the “best stock” of human beings (or corn or cows or whatever) then you don’t select the “best” male and “best” female, since any person making the selections would most likely choose males and females with similar characteristics. But what you NEED is for the males and females to be VERY different. This produces what is known as hybrid vigor, a genetic effect that results in offspring with superior qualities from pairings between members of genetically distinct subpopulations. The extraordinary attributes of our current president, for example, is not really the exception, but more the rule – the offspring of a black African and a white American.
Interesting, Jon. But I worry that your argument only reinforces the idea that “eugenics” is still somehow a “real” science. That is, it seems to me that what you’re suggesting is only that the eugeneticists (is that the right word? is it eugenicists? i don’t know) merely got one of their facts wrong, i.e. the fact of “how” to produce the “best stock” of human beings. My claim is that the very endeavor of attempting to produce the “best stock” of human beings (as OPPOSED to “corn or cows or whatever”) is unscientific, inasmuch as it relies on normative judgments that are inclined to favor (in your words) “males and females with similar characteristics [to the observer].” Why doesn’t this also apply to corn and cows, you ask? Quite simply, because corn and cows are NOT scientists… they aren’t determining the normative standards for their own species or genera.
That said, I may be willing to concede that the very conecpt of what you call “hybrid vigor” is itself anti-normative… but I’d have to hear more about it. And more about science’s commitment to it.