Guest Post by The Zman
Last week, famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins outraged all of the rage heads on Twitter by tweeting out, “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology” The rage heads responded with outrage and demands that he be thrown into a well for bad think.
It was one of those events where people revealed things about themselves that they probably wish they had kept private. The “world’s foremost philosopher” managed to step on a series of rakes responding to Paul Ramsey. Not satisfied with his twitter performance, he did a full hour on YouTube, where he must have broken a record for the number of logical fallacies committed in one sitting. Apparently he has yet to reach the chapter on Hume’s law or the masked-man fallacy.
Molyneux’s response was fairly typical, so it is a useful, if unfortunate, example to use when discussing the issue raised by Dawkins. Eugenics, however one defines it, can be both immoral and effective. The morality of it has nothing to do with whether it would work, however one defines that. They are separate issues. Slavery “worked” for a long time, but then we decided it was immoral and it was eliminated. Slavery was not eliminated because it was unworkable or impractical.
His blunders are not surprising, as we live in an age in which morality has been anathematized and made illegitimate. We are no longer allowed to oppose something on moral grounds. Instead we’re required to make economic arguments or make appeals to science. Simply not wanting something, because you don’t like it is no longer a legitimate position. We see this here. Molyneux could not simply say eugenics is immoral, so he claimed it would not work.
The narrow definition of eugenics, according to Webster’s, is “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations to improve the population’s genetic composition.” Of course, the term is loaded with historical significance and has a strong negative connotation. It brings to mind evil doctors experimenting on children or the state sterilizing people they deem unfit. Of course, you know who looms over any discussion about human fitness these days.
That said, Western societies have been putting a thumb on the scale, as far as the mating habits of the people, for a long time. A great example of this is the laws against consanguineous marriage. In the Middle Ages, the Church and then secular rulers enforced rules against marrying close relatives. This had a huge impact on the human capital of Europe. Cousin marriage leads to lower intelligence and most likely amplifies normal kinship into clannishness.
Henry Harpending and Peter Frost argued that the prolific use of the death penalty in Western Europe, starting in the late Middle Ages, pacified the population. Young men, who committed crimes, were hanged, thus eliminating them from the breeding pool at an early age. Do this long enough and the genes of violent men are slowly reduced. As interpersonal violence declined, men prone to it declined in status, thus reducing their value in the sexual marketplace. That’s eugenics.
That’s also a great example of how the moral arguments about eugenics are mostly based on a cartoon version of the past. Few would deny that the reduction in interpersonal violence was a good thing for the West. Similarly, no one would argue that a society has no right to defend itself against the violent. Like everything else, morality is about trade-offs. Reducing the amount mayhem and violence with the prolific use of the death penalty looks like a pretty good trade-off.
Now, Frost and Harpending could be wrong about the impact of the death penalty, but their theory is not wrong. We can make rules that reduce the reproductive success of those possessing undesirable traits. Those rules, given enough time, will reduce that undesirable trait. If we wanted, we can use force to eliminate those people from the breeding pool. East Asia has been using soft coercion for generations to alter the breeding habits of their people.
Of course, a big part of the hysteria is the implications. If eugenics is a real thing, it means people are not amorphous blobs that can be molded into any shape. To give an inch on the eugenics question is to give up entirely on the blank slate theology. Instead the true believers argue against reality by denying it or avoiding it. You see that in the Dawkins thread, where various people, mostly women, offered ridiculous claims against the reality of animal husbandry and agriculture.
Ultimately, the topic of eugenics brings us back to that point about discussing morality and collective agency in the modern age. A eugenic policy would mean legitimizing the collective will. It would also mean accepting that people collectively have an identity that is rooted in their nature. The war on our collective humanity starts with denying us a right to say who we are and what makes us who we are. It means denying us the legitimacy to want what we want for no other reason than we want it.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
It should be obvious to everyone that all people are NOT created equal. Certain races have higher average IQ’s. Certain races have higher rates of violence. Certain races are better athletes. Etc.
What any society should do is allow discrimination to work on a person by person basis. Making laws against discrimination only catches the most obvious cases and the more hidden discrimination is practiced by all.
We should simply stop subsidizing failure. Shut down welfare for those that can dig a ditch and then give them a ditch to dig. Shut down foreign aid to societies that seem to only know how to procreate at an alarming rate and can’t even properly feed themselves. Stop giving away the working class’s labor in the form of money to people that historically are basket cases. Let them sink or swim on their own. Helping a fellow human being is a noble instinct but when helping becomes dependence that’s where we should draw the line.
Jimmy the Greek was a man after his time regarding black athletes. I see proof of this in my family. My cousin the mud shark has two sons. one very bright, fair skinned with blue eyes. other dark and very dim.
Yes! There is a big difference between a hand UP and a hand OUT. Hand ups should happen when unexpected tragedy intervenes, like the household breadwinner gets cancer or taken out in an accident. Hand outs should not happen when people fail to control their own behavior. You get more of what you incentivize. We have incentivized welfare breeders for a few generations now, the results have been predictably poor.
Meh. Another common fallacy: that the average means diddly squat in societal terms.
How did the Jews fare against the Egyptians?
More importantly: if the US is the richest nation, why can’t it take care of the poorest/dumbest 10%?
The real issue is inequality. The lack of prosperity which almost everyone is experiencing is because money is being siphoned off at all levels of society by the 1% – and they have cleverly nudged the 30-40% middle class to fight against each other and the poor people.
Why should the US take care of the poorest/dumbest 10%? For that matter, why should it take care of any damn person at all? Not its job. The reason it is the richest has to do with its history of its people being self-reliant and self-responsible. But it is going to lose that position if it does not return to its roots.
The real issue is welfare of all types, corporate or individual.
You are at least consistently stupid.
Nice to see you being your typical self.
When the revolution comes, you’ll be ready?
The United States is the richest because it didn’t get mauled in World War 1 and World War 2, and made bank selling rebuilding materials and food to the nations that did.
But I wouldn’t expect an obviously historically illiterate like yourself to have expended the “self reliant” effort to understand this.
Nor would I expect that someone with your “self reliance” ethic understand that American society worked because of trust: trust that everyone was doing the right thing, that everyone had equal opportunity and that life would get better.
Because self reliance is correlated with trust…/sarc
I guess I practiced eugenics. Made sure my mate was smart, good looking, from healthy stock. As a result, we got smart, successful, healthy children. Go figure.
That’s another thing we have in common.
It’s much easier to do something yourself than it is to convince someone else to do something.
Yeah, but who was the Daddy?
The one with the largest dick.
Meh. More commentary by people who clearly don’t understand how genetics or evolutionary pressures work.
Among the many fallacies: it is *really* hard to breed a gene out of a population, once it has taken. We can do it with crop/pet animals and plants because we genocide the existing population and replace it with essentially monocultures.
Since no one has ever done that, over time, for people – the notion that the death penalty or any other nonsense is able to “improve” the human gene pool is crap. This means Dawkins is wrong – it simply isn’t pragmatically possible to treat humans like animals and plants. It also means the “moralists” are wrong as well.
The second most common nonsense is that success or survival now means anything over time. Personal opinions, politics, etc are irrelevant – all that matters is survival.
And that means the Catholic Hispanics and the North Africans are winning. Wars can be won with guns and they can be won with babies…
Again, you are dumb as a rock. One thing that is happening is that the average IQ of the world is plummeting. Why? Because morons are surviving anr reproducing, who not long ago died off. But today we feed them, because of dickheads like you. They were never meant to survive and thrive. The herd always was meant to be weeded out.
The law of averages wins again; always has/always will.
Eugenics is real.