Bowden! - 14 - The E Word
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Summary
Eugenics, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and the whole constellation of ideas and thinkers surrounding that subject. Richard and Jonathan discuss the history of Eugenics, and why it has been dismissed as a pseudoscience.
Transcript
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Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard, and welcome back as well, Jonathan Bowden.
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Very good. Jonathan, today we're going to talk about eugenics, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard,
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and the whole constellation of ideas and thinkers surrounding that subject.
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And before we jump into the conversation, I think it's worth mentioning this.
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We certainly live in an age of partisan vitriol and left-right battles,
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but some of the things that really interest me are not those places where the left and the mainstream left and right disagree with one another,
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but where they are in total agreement, where they walk lockstep.
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And one of those things is the denunciation of eugenics as the most evil movement, or at least one of them, of the past 200 years.
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And it's certainly also quite often associated with that other most evil movement of fascism or national socialism.
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And that it's both, I think all of them are in agreement that it is both a pseudoscience,
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but then it's also in some ways all too effective and something we need to resist.
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So it didn't work, but then it was all too effective at the same time, usually in some of these irrational critiques they have of it.
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And, you know, this is a fascinating opinion because this is something that has changed dramatically over the past century.
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It's hard to find another opinion where you have a 180-degree shift in such a fairly short amount of time.
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It's almost as if the Western world converted to Islam and began denouncing Christianity and secularism overnight.
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Perhaps not that dramatic, but you see my point.
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Certainly something like the National Socialist Regime in Germany did have eugenics programs.
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They were not actually as pronounced as some might believe.
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They actually modeled a lot of those programs on the eugenics programs found in Sweden and in the state of California.
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You had eugenics being endorsed by university presidents.
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It was something that was opposed by the, say, old-time religion folks or whom you might call reactionaries.
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It was something that might even be on the left in certain contexts.
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Certainly with someone like Lothrop Stoddard, whom we're going to speak about a little bit later,
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it was a position held by someone who openly thought of himself as a progressive and as a modernist.
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Actually, in a talk I gave not too long ago at the H.L. Mencken Club, I showed some pictures.
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They were actually taken by a very good book, a biography of Lothrop Stoddard,
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which is written by a left liberal who doesn't like Stoddard very much but recognizes his importance.
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But these pictures were of eugenics buildings at the State Fair.
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And I believe the one, a famous one, is from the Kansas State Fair.
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And they would have competition for the fittest family.
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And what they wanted to see was a good genotype, that is a healthy family with all boys and girls looking strong and smart
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So eugenics really had a positive value in people's lives.
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It was something that meant that they were healthy and good and normal and people of quality.
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And obviously this has gone through a total reversal.
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Well, Jonathan, just to kind of, I think we should talk more about all these things in detail.
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But maybe you could pick up on that basic history of eugenics that I've just outlined.
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That something that was hegemonic has become unspeakable just over the course of 100 years.
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Something that was endorsed by presidents and now is associated with crazed lunatics.
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Maybe just talk a little bit about that and talk maybe a little bit about why that happened.
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Do you think it was just the legacy of the Second World War or was there something more involved?
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So why don't you just pick up on that, this, let's say, our consciousness of eugenics in the 20th century.
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Yes, I think what we have here is the acceptance of and then the rejection of one and the other.
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The notion that biology impinges upon social matters to a very considerable degree.
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From about sort of 1860, 1870 through to the 1940s, you had a very pronounced view in all sorts of countries,
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particularly countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
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Countries that you don't often associate with these sorts of ideas.
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But eugenics ideas were very pronounced in the politics in these societies and amongst academic and clinical elites.
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It was essentially, in some ways, a progressive biologism.
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It was the belief that you could actually act upon man and upon the circumstances of lived anthropology,
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as contemporaneously understood, and you could improve the human lot,
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just as you could act on the social and economic sphere from a center-left perspective to improve mankind's lot.
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You could actually, and from an interventionist conservative perspective as well,
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How this was to be done was the subject for, you know, sort of maximal debate.
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But the idea that if you bred the strongest children and the tallest children and the fairest children
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and the most intellectually precocious children, who also had pronounced athletic abilities,
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that you would actually begin to create more wholesome human beings,
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better families, and better communities, and better societies,
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that sort of viewpoint would have been regarded as athletic in the mid-1930s.
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And it would have been shared by left-wing liberals, some socialists,
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many sort of active and latte-faire libertarians and old liberals,
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many new liberals, many conservatives of all sorts.
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The only people who would really oppose it were people who were very much linked
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because, of course, these ideas are inevitably linked to notions of biological health
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and reproduction, what would later be cast by feminism,
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later in the century, second-wave feminism, as reproductive rights,
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but then was looked at as reproduction for health and for eugenic health at that.
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And this meant that contraception and abortion,
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abortion as a form of contraception, particularly in relation to life,
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which was considered in some respects unworthy or inferior in one category or another,
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And Christian moral concerns about that aspect of eugenics was very pronounced.
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However, probably a large number of evangelicals shared semi-eugenic ideas,
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because racial and national ideas were so much more conservative during this epoch
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that it meant that the amount of opposition that eugenics got was relatively small
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in comparison to the almost universal odium in which it's held at the present time.
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You know, one of the groups that loathes eugenics at the moment is the evangelical Christians,
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but it's worth mentioning that there were eugenic laws in the state of North Carolina,
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And the state sterilized a tremendous amount of people, most of them black,
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you know, which it considered unfit for bearing children.
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So there was a kind of old-time religious, you know, repulsion from eugenics as modernists,
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But just to back up your point, it was something that was accepted
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by the large majority of Protestants in the South.
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Yes, the sterilization of the unfit, which was carried out outright across the Western world,
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until a particular generation of natural scientists died out
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in the terms of the social application of biological ideas in the 1970s.
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Really, what you have is you have a generation that accepts these ideas
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and carries them out in orphanages and halfway houses
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and children's homes and clinics for the elderly and the infirm
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and mental hospitals and way stations for the mentally subnormal
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and carries these functions out right across the 50s, 60s, and into the 70s.
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and the scientists who follow them don't have the same ideas
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because they've been exposed to a different and a contrary mindset
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and sterilization of people with grossly deformed and inadequate IQs, for example,
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to prevent them from breeding people who might be described as idiots.
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that came to an end in most Western countries around the same time in the mid-1970s.
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And I think it came to an end because generationally,
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had essentially passed through the system and were retiring
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and being replaced by a cohort that didn't share the same notions.
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I also think it's important to realize that essentially what's happened
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is that two concepts have been conflated into one another
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And this is the idea of eugenics as against dysgenics.
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And dysgenics, which is, if you like, the negative side of eugenics,
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but you also act to, in some senses, prevent life through abortion
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or through selective contraceptive use or through sterilization,
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the proactive and yet sort of SNP-oriented and negative side of eugenics
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is one which only the most niggardly and sort of nihilistic
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because they find nauseous the idea of happy, athletic,
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intellectually precocious families beaming for the camera
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You know, it fills women with nausea and disgust.
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But the number of people who are filled with nausea and disgust
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So that sort of eugenics has been deconstructed
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I remember a Christian woman of my acquaintance
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about how she was appalled by pictures of athletes
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She said it's monstrously eugenic having these pictures
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of these healthy goddess and god-type individuals,
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reminding everyone who's palsied and lame and sick
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And it's essentially a form of conceptually beating them
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So it shows you how far the sort of negative reaction
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to even the idea of healthiness as a presumed good
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But the corollary that you actually obtain health
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is something which has been rather left out of the equation.
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that their viewpoint tends in a sort of semi-eugenic direction.
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So certainly there's been an incredible reversal.
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sort of quote-unquote getting rid of the inferior
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but they are in some ways pursuing negative eugenics