ON REMOVING THE BARRIER TO
A CIVILIZED DISCUSSION OF EUGENICS
from The Fellowship HeraldSee also, "Race, Evolutionary Biology, and the Kingdom of Heaven"
To begin to talk about eugenics – or any other subject that touches upon human nature – it is necessary to shed the straitjackets of ideology. At this time one is not allowed to argue the merits of eugenics, but is forced to argue the merits of having a value system at all. Those who would discuss heredity and culture today find themselves in the same position as those who would discuss religion: having to argue with a mentality that is, on principle, opposed to the very idea of objectively-real values.
Eugenics, with its fundamental assertion of genetic inequality and of the desirability of encouraging some people to breed and discouraging others, raises a double alarm in the contemporary mind. The first alarm has to do with its perceived attack upon the spiritual value of equality. Equality is the supreme value of the political pseudoreligion of the age – Rousseauism.
This alarm also rings on a philosophic level. The absolute value-neutrality to which liberalism aspires resents the implication that anything is better than anything else. Both aspects of this alarm (genetic inequality and value inequality) imply a hierarchy of values, something that equalitarianism cannot tolerate.
A free and open discussion of eugenics is blocked by the Rousseauist equalitarian ideology that dominates public discourse and tries to prevent any consideration of human differences. Of course, discussion is also dampened by revulsion against the horrors of Nazism, which hijacked the label of eugenics, and so cast disrepute upon it (see the postscript on anti-Semitism).
Rousseauist ideology disregards hereditary factors, believing solely in environmental factors and in the enlightened application of external coercion to indoctrinate the population in politically correct behavior. The only rescue from single-issue ideologies and the tyranny they bring is a recognition of the fact that both heredity and environment are important causative factors, and that there is a third element which eludes the potentially deterministic controls of heredity and environment. This third element will be discussed later in this paper.
Rousseauism
Rousseau is the godfather of the resentment-based utopianism and revolutionism that has afflicted western culture for the last two centuries and given birth to the most spectacularly disastrous pseudoreligion, Marxism. Rousseau’s opinion of society is utterly negative, yet he has a fervent religious sentimentality about the purity of the human heart.
For Rousseau, society was to blame for all inequality and injustice. The cardinal sin is that society has “deviated from the state of nature.” “Inequality (was) almost non-existent among men in the state of nature..It is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind.”
Some examples of his fractured logic are:
· man is innocent and free, but the association of men in society is the source of all evil;
· society is utterly depraved, yet it may respond intelligently to the summons to moral regeneration, and if it embraces Rousseau’s ideas, will even embody the gospel of Christ;
· social coercion has always been evil, but a Rousseauist society may coercively indoctrinate men in worthy social behavior; he writes, “the sovereign may banish from the State whoever does not believe” the principles of the civil religion.
Rousseau’s Christian-flavored religion, then, is profoundly unbiblical, while his socialism is hostile to all social formations except those he would imagine.
Occasionally he gives honest expression to his hostility to Christianity. “A society of true Christians would no longer be a society of men” because of Christianity’s pacifism and other-worldliness. “Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny for the latter not to profit by it always. True Christians are made to be slaves.” Here we can see both Nietzsche and Marx glimmering in Rousseau’s eye! Would that we could go back in time and warn Europe not to be seduced by this man!
His central revolt is against a biblical God. “The grandest ideas of the Divine nature come to us from reason only… Conscience never deceives us… The service God requires is of the heart…With regard to revelation…I neither accept nor reject it, I only reject all obligation to be convinced of its truth.”
Here he shows his hand. If one believes in a revelation from God, one cannot be neutral about its messages. It seems that the highest reality for Rousseau is “the heart,” not God.
Nazism was largely a revolt against the Rousseauist milieu in Europe. In practice, both Marxism and Nazism have been profoundly anti-eugenic, notwithstanding that Nazis covered themselves with eugenic rhetoric while Marxists have repudiated it. Both have engaged in cephalocide: the killing of brains, that is, the systematic repression of independent thinkers and spiritual leaders. I focus in this paper upon left wing ideology not because it is more wrong than right-wing ideology but because the academy in America has been such a shameless defender of it.
According to Max Scheler, the psychological force behind Rousseau’s humanitarianism is ressentiment. “Humanitarian…’love of mankind’…levels to uniformity all the objective value-differences between man and man. It is not a spiritual act of the soul but a seething, intemperate sensual pathos…obliterating the unique God-ordained character of each individual, class, race or nation in favour of a homogenized world-puree of mankind. Once the common reference of all men to God is denied, and with it the final deepest and most effective interconnection of souls, their link in and through God, it is impossible to go on assuming any hierarchy of values to which our love should be directed in varying measure according to definite laws of preference.”
The Religious Meaning of Equality
American patriotic rhetoric involves a religious glorification of Equality, and this has accelerated with time. It is necessary to examine the philosophic error at the heart of the religion of equalitarianism. It is a confusion of spirit with matter. The fact is, all persons of moral decision-making capacity have the same spirit-endowment; we are all equally the children of God, and are equally invited to participate in the family of God. This is a spiritual principle transmitted to us by the letters of Paul and, even more so, the parables of Jesus. This spiritual truth, however, has been exploited by political thinkers in America, most influentially enshrined in a line of Jefferson’s (“that all men are created equal”) and in Lincoln’s use of that idea.
As with many thinkers of his time, Jefferson believed in a unity of principles governing the material, intellectual and spiritual realms, and called this unity of principles “nature.” It would not have served his purpose to make a distinction between the equality that exists on the spirit-potential level and the inequality that prevails on all levels of actuality and on the intellectual and physical levels. His purpose was not philosophic but political, asserting the rights of the American gentry against the authority of the crown.
Likewise today, most of those who make equality a supreme ideal fail to distinguish between spiritual and material realities and between potentials and actuals. Equalitarianism is not a Christian value but a post-Christian or anti-Christian one. The basis of religious freedom is loyalty to the Creator, who brings out one’s potentials. Equalitarian freedom seeks freedom from all constraints; it is anti-parental resentment writ large.
There is a type of equality among persons, but it does not exist on the natural level. There is a tremendous natural inequality in physical and mental abilities Equality is found only in the spiritual fact that we are all equally the children of God and have an equal right to begin to participate in eternal (and temporal) life.
Failure to understand this leads to the distorted equality claims of socialism. It is simplistic and false to think that all evil comes from the unequal distribution of wealth, and that all criminal behavior is merely a helpless response to environment. Along with this belief goes a false idea of citizenship: the claiming of rights without responsibilities, the notion that everyone is equally deserving of social rewards. This undermines the principle of social responsibility.
Genuine equal opportunity aids civilization by allowing talent to rise, regardless of race or class, and not by attempting to levelize everyone to a certain social average. Equalitarianism is an unexamined value. In fact it is composed of about equal parts of value-distortion and forlorn hope, of sentimentalized resentment and half-hearted good intentions.
Materialistic sociologies that attribute all human behavior to environment, denying heredity and free will, are paralleled by the politics of social engineering and a maternalistic dictatorship dedicated to coercive, mind-numbing nurturing.
Regarding Jefferson’s “created equal” remark, Lincoln asked “whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The answer is: not if it is conceived as literal material equality and the equality of ideas, with none more true than another, because this requires the coercive suppression of excellence and the rejection of values.
Causation, Ideology, and Values
All value distortions tend to be dualistic. The ideological opposition between environmental determinists and genetic determinists is an example of the common distortions of supposedly opposite camps. Mature philosophy recognizes the influence of environment and of heredity and also of the crucial third ingredient: spirituality and its mysterious energy of creative freedom. The origins and causes of human behavior can be grouped in three realms: environmental influence, heredity endowment, and spirit-identification. These culminate in the three great human activities: work, wedlock, and worship. Temporal survival necessitates work. Biologic survival and social stability combine to require the existence of marriage. Personal survival of physical death requires faith, and when this is given, one worships. Work, wedlock, and worship can be used in the perfecting of personal life. And all three assist in the discharge of the greatest responsibility in this world: raising children.
All three involved a process of selection. Society, too, has selective prerogatives; individual rights are conditional. Irresponsible parenting can trigger society’s right to restrict procreation.
A balanced philosophy must recognize the threefold causation. Only a recognition of spirituality can prevent a decline into ideologies of absolute environmental or racial determinism. Only spirituality offers a true answer to the extremes of ideology. And the hostility of ideology to spirituality is shown by the evolution of torture in recent decades, the object of which has increasingly become not the obtaining of answers, but the destruction of the person, of individuality. Evidence of this nightmare trend rolls in from Russia, China, Chile, Uruguay, Iran. The last example shows how religious ideology can also participate in this assault upon the soul. Single-issue ideologies of any kind are a profound threat to human freedom.
Procreation was formerly a duty; in America currently is is conceived of as an absolute right. A more civilized viewpoint is that it is a privilege accompanied by supreme responsibility. Humanitarian concern is leading to recognition that irresponsible parenting inflicts terrible suffering on children and secondarily upon society, and that society has a right to withhold reproductive rights in some cases.
Most social values involve a eugenic aspect, but we are largely unconscious of the extent to which genetic strategies dominate our thinking. In light of prenatal counseling, of incest taboos, of sexual images and preferences and the many other ways that reproductive decisions are influenced, it has been said that eugenics is already here. The question for us is what kind of eugenics shall we practice?
Over-rapid material change, anarchy among nations, and the scourge of thoughtless procreation are combining to destabilize societies. But there is hope for civilization if advancing mores can affect the process of child-rearing, mores which themselves have unconsciously benefited from religious idealism. But the process in undermined by intense ideological conflict and philosophic confusion.
We should approach eugenics only through a mature philosophy that recognizes the influences of nature, nurture, and eternity. The last ingredient is the domain of religion, and governments should not pay it much mind, but they also should not oppress it. And academics should not deny its existence, for if they do, they betray us into the hands of ideological determinists of the left or right.
Postscript: Christian Anti-Semitism: It is important to recognize that the dominant factor in Nazi ideology had nothing to do with eugenics or any other concept; it was emotive. It was anti-Semitism, that is, a form of religious derangement, the origin of which is dread and guilt arising from Christian doctrines of the sacrifice of the Son, and of the sacramental consumption of the Son by believers. A perceptive study of the Middle Ages reveals this. Confused by the contradiction between a loving God and a sacrificial God, the Christian projects his shame and blame onto an Other who stands for himself. Secret feelings of shame for drinking the Lord’s blood led to attribution of blood-magic to Jews. Similarly, resentment against a God who made salvation dependent upon a ritual murder, and demanded that the murder be relived in liturgy, was the source of the myth of Jewish ritual murder of Christian children (the principal symbol of Christ in those days was the Christ-child). Dundes refers to this process as projective inversion. Among traditional cultures, Judaism has proven to be the most eugenic, but that is a subject for another paper.
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship