Sometimes an author lands on an insight that your mind had been circling for ages, waiting for clear articulation. I had that experience with a new essay in First Things by Colin Redemer, on the changing spirit of eugenics. Eugenics was once conceived of as a project of improvement via elimination. Now, elimination is the primary attraction. Redemer writes:
The old eugenics of Galton and his heirs, of Buck v. Bell (1927) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was many terrible things, but its terribleness was at least coherent. It believed, with the confidence peculiar to the late nineteenth century, that the human species was a stock to be managed, and that the managers were identifiable by their breeding, their cranial measurements, and their position in the social hierarchy. The eugenicist of 1910 looked out at the world and saw inferiors. He honored himself. He was monstrous, but he was monstrous in the direction of self-congratulation.
The new eugenics operates from an almost perfectly inverted posture. It does not look outward with contempt but inward with revulsion. When someone on the internet announces that it would be better if people with certain genetic predispositions — depression, obesity, chronic illness — simply did not reproduce, he is rarely talking about strangers. He is talking about himself. In nearly every case, he has been taught to see his own body, his own mind, his own inherited frailties as defects in need of correction or, better yet, elimination. He does not want to improve the race. He wants to be unmade.
Sometimes truth rings like a bell. There is a self-hatred and disgust at work in the modern eugenics movement. Therefore, it can’t be argued with straightforwardly, on the science. It has to be confronted in the arena of values. It’s about whether men who suffer from this or that biological condition have equal worth before the law, and infinite worth before the Creator.