Even war is supposed to be due to the omnipotent deity of Heredity.
Superior races by their patriotism and loyalty destroy the weak
and the helpless, and relentlessly exterminate all peaceful tribes.
Such warlike stock comes of superior clay. The dominant races have
some miraculous germ-plasm, special “unit characters,” wonderful
dominant “units” which, like a precious heritage, these races
transmit unsullied and untarnished to their descendants.
Wars, carnage, butcheries make for progress, culture, and
evolution. Our boasted civilization with its “scientific” business
thoroughness and its ideal of “efficiency” attempts to carry into
effect this quasi-evolutionary doctrine--this apotheosis of brute
force under the aegis of science. The eugenic belief is really
a recrudescence of the ancient savage superstition of the magic
virtues of noble blood and of divine king stock.
All nervous, mental, neuropathic, and psychopathic maladies are
supposed to be a matter of heredity. If people are poor, ignorant,
superstitious, stupid, degraded, brutal, and sick, the eugenists
unhesitatingly put it all down to poor stock.
The eugenic remedy is as simple as it is believed to be
efficacious: Introduce by legislation “efficient” laws favoring
“eugenic” marriage, and teach the masses control of births. The
select and chosen stock alone should multiply--the millennium is
then bound to come. Such is the doctrine of our medico-biological
sages.
“Scientific” farmers and breeders of vegetables, fruits, and
cattle are regarded as competent judges of human “breeders.”
Agriculturists and horticulturists set themselves up as advisers
in “the business of raising good crops of efficient children.”
Bachelors, spinsters, and the childless generally, are specially
versed in eugenic wisdom and pedagogics.
All social ills and individual complaints are referred to one main
source--heredity. With the introduction of eugenic legislation,
with the sterilization of the socially unfit, among whom the
greatest men and women may be included, with the breeding of good
“orthodox, common stock,” and with eugenic Malthusian control
of births, all evil and diseases on earth will cease, while the
Philistine “superman” will reign supreme forevermore.
In the Middle Ages all diseases and epidemics, all wars, all social
and private misfortunes were considered as visitations of Divine
wrath. The fear instinct held sway, terrorizing poor, deluded
humanity. In modern times our would-be eugenic science refers all
ills of the flesh and woes of the mind to an outraged Heredity.
The dark ages had resort to prayers, fasts, and penitence, while
our age childishly pins its faith to the miraculous virtues and
rejuvenating, regenerative powers of legislative eugenic measures,
and to the eugenic Malthusian control of births.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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