Eugenics and the Civil Religion
Tasteful, passive-aggressive eugenics
Conspiracies on the left and right abound regarding the eugenic plans of elites. Historically, eugenics was as much an anti-elite as elite theory, with Marxists and other kinds of socialists like the Fabians enthusiastically endorsing the selective breeding of mankind.
Left eugenicists believed that historical elites had selectively bred classes of men for menial and degrading drudgery and sought to ameliorate this condition through eugenic practices. Further, expert-trusting centrist opponents of extremism like Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and John Maynard Keynes were avowed eugenicists. Eugenics programs touted by such leftists and progressives often targeted poor whites[i].
For contemporary leftists and centrists, however, suggesting that a biological superstructure was created to protect capital or “power” is taboo. Only ideas and man-made institutions that influence an individual human’s behavior during his lifetime can be capitalist or “power” superstructures.
Below I look at reasons provided by our civil religion for why this is the case.
Introduction to the current state
Today, eugenics is mostly associated with the right and frequently with the Hitler regime’s attempts to “ennoble an entire race,” to use the language of Austrian philosopher Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. The modern treatment of eugenics is therefore couched in the same group-level moral language that inhibits the objective assessment of European fascism and nationalism today. For example, the U.S. government website for the National Human Genome Research Institute defines eugenics in its glossary using moral language:
Using unscientific ideas and immoral and unethical means, eugenics sought to solve the problems of society by eliminating the “unfit” and encouraging the “fit” to increase in number. The American Eugenics Movement was one of the most active and extreme manifestations, inspiring aspects of eugenics ideologies and practices in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere around the world. While eugenics reached its peak in popularity during the Second World War, eugenics practices remained widespread globally until the 1970s. And in many cases, sadly, continue today.
Because our civil religion is character content-based, it eschews group-level ascriptive assessments of individuals in favor of individual character-based assessments. This normative stance classifies the group-based right and left premises justifying eugenic conclusions as unacceptable public beliefs about human groups. Further because the civil religion focuses on an individual’s character, it is generally hostile to coercive restrictions on individual autonomy.
Yet the civil religion does not necessarily proscribe eugenic restrictions on individual reproductive behavior. We know, for instance, that the civil religion tolerates indirect restrictions on breeding through the incarceration of criminals and teen pregnancy prevention programs, because the intent of such programs is not explicitly eugenic.
The civil religion is nonetheless on guard against certain kinds of eugenic policies, especially those that directly coerce individuals or appear to be intended as efforts to restrict the breeding practices of certain groups like protected class minorities.
A recent example from Louisiana is instructive.[ii]
In 2008, a Louisiana politician suffered accusations of racism and eugenics when he proposed an incentive program for welfare recipients to undergo tubal ligation and vasectomy operations. In response to the accusations, the politician stated that he didn’t understand how his proposal could be eugenic since it was “voluntary,” and argued that the proposal wasn’t racist because “the majority of people on welfare are white.” In other words, the policy merely was intended to disrupt a form of multi-generational welfare dependence that was burdening the state.
While Planned Parenthood experts were among those critical of the Louisiana politician, the article helpfully points out that the birth control advocacy organization had, as recently as the 1980s, used monetary incentive programs to dissuade teen pregnancy.
The civil religion and modern anti-eugenics
The Louisiana pol’s response to critics is helpful for understanding our civil religion’s current stance toward eugenics.
The civil religion frowns upon eugenics because it is an involuntary restriction upon an individual’s right to choose their form of existence (to paraphrase Justice Kennedy), which must necessarily include the right to reproduce. The civil religion also frowns upon group-level eugenics (the pol mentions race) because group membership is an accident of an individual like religion and not a determinant of their character content. Americans are autonomous individuals who are to be assessed based on the choices they make, not slaves condemned to embody roles and capacities ascribed to them by virtue of the group into which they’re born. (For more on the concept of ascriptive identities, see my post on Parsons here).
Thus, directly coercive eugenic policies violate our civil religion (and potentially the Constitution, although the issue has not been conclusively decided by the judiciary). Further, non-coercive policies that have the effect of inhibiting reproduction are invalid under our civil religion if they betray a eugenic intent behind the policy, or if they disproportionately inhibit reproduction among a certain group (though not poor whites, as the Louisiana pol’s self-defense makes clear).
These norms entail that the premises of old right, left, and center eugenics are fundamentally at odds with the American civil religion. A person’s right to reproduce (and their right to choose their reproductive partner) can’t be restricted for intentionally eugenic purposes. Moreover, the belief that capital or other factors in history have bred certain classes for inferiority and suffering is not a belief that should be expressed in public, nor is it a belief that should animate public policy.
Civilizing Eugenics
Marxists, Fascists, and centrist-utilitarian eugenicists must therefore not openly proclaim that they believe being born into a group condemns an individual to a given role or fate because of an inborn nature or soul. Moreover, they cannot advocate the direct coercion of individuals into not reproducing.
However, by virtue of our civil religion being character-content based, it is more accommodating of group-level assessments that explain apparent group-level traits in terms of environmental conditioning, habituation, and education. Therefore, heritable group-level ascriptive traits can be smuggled back into our civil religion – civilized -- by looking at individual and group environmental history.
We therefore see that the majority of social science and historical research today is dedicated to articulating the ways in which victim groups are ascribed certain roles and traits by the environmental pressures to which they are involuntarily subjected, including material and physical oppression, accidents of birth location, but also beliefs members of these groups adopt. This means for these academics that there is a pre-environmental person or soul that is then ascribed roles and traits through a stochastic process that starts with where and to whom the person is born and continues throughout their life. The genetics of the individual’s ancestors is not a variable that affects this process.
Social scientists and historians can now openly speak of and explain apparently ascriptive traits of groups in terms of a history, the negative consequences of which can be ameliorated through the elimination of environmental privation in the same way that a pagan savage’s character can be redeemed through proper religious instruction and habituation.
However, as a result of the growth of group narcissism, our civil religion now prohibits the ascription of fault for negative traits to victim groups. Such traits must now be construed as the consequence of unjust impositions by a hostile external world upon a Christlike victim group.
This entails that academics focus on oppressor-groups and their own corresponding suite of ascriptive traits, which traits usually revolve around an unintentional tendency to subjugate and deceive victim groups, and burden them with unfair conditions that have the effect of producing what look like inborn ascriptive traits in the victim group. Here is where we see the concepts of systemic and institutional bias or racism emerge.
The improvement of the character of groups unjustly ascribed with negative roles and traits is therefore tied to the elimination of bad ascriptive traits in the groups that impose those roles and traits upon victimized groups. Though members of oppressor groups are often unintentionally subjecting victim groups to ascriptive existences by virtue of those members being born into the oppressor group, our civil religion requires that members of oppressor groups be able to free themselves from this condition through character-content revisions.
In practice this means members of oppressor groups acknowledging, for example, that they do not deserve anything they have by virtue of their own individual characters and capacities but rather because, for example, there once was a policy to not loan money to Black people. This acknowledgment is expected to catalyze assent to policies that correct that historic wrong through wealth and prestige transfers from oppressor groups to victim groups. This act of redemption purifies the oppressor and victim groups and re-sets the stage for an equal competition among individuals for positive character content and the material spoils that follow.
This convoluted redemption process remains at the group level and does not mete out costs and benefits to individuals based upon individual merit and character content, which brings us back to the reason for why the Louisiana politician could defend his policy proposal by countering that the majority of the people it would negatively affect were white people.
We have, operationally or functionally speaking, come full circle to the uncivil left-progressive eugenics of yore through the values of the civil religion itself, though this time without the uncivil, intentionally eugenic and coercive content.
Policies that reduce the reproductive fitness of ordinary “white” people without applying direct coercion against reproductive behavior, such as wealth and prestige transfers, are justified by reference to traits that are ascribed to those white people by virtue of their membership in the white group, and by reference to traits that are ascribed to victim group members by virtue of their membership in their own groups. Individual character content is not evaluated.
Looking at race ennoblement in a different light
Given this current state of affairs, I feel like Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s (K-L) negative assessment of Hitler’s eugenics policy is salient. While it’s a general, off-hand statement subject to multiple interpretations, I think it’s reasonable to suggest K-L would agree with something like the following.
K-L was an aristocratic elitist who frowned upon Hitler’s eugenics policy because ennobling an entire race was a utopian egalitarian goal destined to fail, ultimately because there is so much dysgenic ruin in a race. Indeed, ethnic Germans, to the extent they constitute a race, populate the entire spectrum of the bell curve for many inherited or partially-inherited traits.
From a nobleman’s perspective, transforming all Germans into noblemen is a nonsensical enterprise. Nobility is a rare trait that can be exhibited by members of many different races such that the assertion that the lower type of German is superior to the higher type of another race – say an eastern European nobleman – by virtue of race cannot be true.
K-L was therefore incensed that Hitler’s policy did not take into account the individual character content of each member of the “German race” and the “lower” races against which they were positioned. Hitler had sought to uplift an entire race out of self- and oppressor-imposed inferiority, but in so doing subjected entire non-German races to unwarranted ascriptive condemnation, much like the civil social engineering policies of today.
You say "Left eugenicists believed that historical elites had selectively bred classes of men for menial and degrading drudgery and sought to ameliorate this condition through eugenic practices...Eugenics programs touted by such leftists and progressives often targeted poor whites." Could you footnote this, and/or comment on the continuity of the left? Jackson Lear: Rebirth of a Nation, p. 100: "The dream of creating a science of eugenics, dedicated to improving and eventually even perfecting human beings, fired the reform imagination for decades. Eugenics was a kind of secular millennialism, a vision of a society where biological engineering complemented social engineering to create a managerial utopia." The main concern was immigrants, to whom the Progressives had an ambivalent relation--assimilation (which would mean miscegenation) at the same time fearing the genetic mixing (deterioration of their "race"). They don't seem to have gotten their "managerial utopia" off the ground by inverting the stigma-hierarchy. That dream seems to be resurrected today, but not claiming a physical basis in science, yet it is the same class advocating social engineering.