Keynes once said, "We should encourage small political and cultural units. It would be a fine thing to have thirty or forty capital cities in Europe, each the center of a self-governing country entirely free from national minorities (who would be dealt with my migrations where necessary).”
Well that’s a bit un-PC, to put it mildly. In fact if you expressed the above sentiment nowadays, the politically correct would explode with contrived righteous indignation.
Of course it could be argued that Europeans are so similar racially, that the above idea of Keynes’s is not racist. However, anyone repeating the above sentiments nowadays would most certainly be accused of racism, not to mention xenophobia, Nazism, and every other expletive imaginable.
Incidentally I got the above quote from "Where Keynes Went Wrong" by Hunter Lewis, p.316. And he got it from "John Maynard Keynes" by Robert Skidelsky (vol3) p.218.
It get’s worse, or funnier (take your pick).
Another interesting bit of historical “shock horror” is that for several years after WWII, the British political left favoured Eugenics: that is denying those with defects the right to reproduce, or even disposing of them. And Eugenics is of course traditionally associated with Nazism.
Indeed The Guardian (Britain’s leading left of centre broadsheet newspaper) had doubts about the National Health Service when it was first set up, and on the grounds that the NHS would make it easier the feckless and defective to survive and reproduce.
Now this will of course have the sanctimonious section of Britain’s political left baffled. That is, they’ll be baffled as to how intelligent people, particularly left of centre intelligent people can accept the above sort of views. But that just illustrates the ignorance of the sanctimonious section of the political left in 2012.
The explanation is that the views adhered to by both political left and political right have nothing to do with REASON, as Simon Jenkins recently pointed out.
In other words if you try arguing in favour of Eugenics or preserving European sub-cultures (as per Keynes), you’d get nowhere. And it wouldn’t matter how good your arguments were, because REASON does not determine political views. What DOES DETERMINE political views is fashion, propaganda, the conventional wisdom, and so on.
Put another way, 90% of the human race (the intelligentsia included) are robots: they’ll think what they are told to think, and do what they’re told to do. The current deficit hysteria in the U.S., brought about in part by the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of propaganda funded by Pete Peterson is an example.
Or put it yet another way, if you are born into a society where a popular form of entertainment consists watching lions eat Christians in your local Colosseum then there is a 90% chance you’ll be happy watching lions eat Christians.
Or as Edmund Burke put it, “Custom reconciles us everything.”
As to Eugenics, there is a perfectly good argument in favour of Eugenics, namely that what with modern medicine and comfortable 21st century lifestyles, the genetic quality of the human race will be deteriorating, because survival of the fittest no longer operates to any great extent. That deterioration may in the future be countered by gene therapy of some sort. But if not, and if you want the human race to survive, then Eugenics is the only way forward.
Of course the latter argument could be flawed. I’m happy to listen to geneticists or similarly well qualified persons who think there is indeed a flaw there.
But don’t expect a reasoned response to the latter argument from the politically correct.
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"As to Eugenics, there is a perfectly good argument in favour of Eugenics, namely that what with modern medicine and comfortable 21st century lifestyles, the genetic quality of the human race will be deteriorating, because survival of the fittest no longer operates to any great extent."
ReplyDeleteThis argument is flawed because genes function as discrete qualitative units, rather than quantitative units that can be averaged across a genetic population. The inheritance of eye color is an example -- if one parent has blue eyes and another parent has brown eyes, an offspring will have either blue or brown eyes, rather than some combination of these 2 colors.
As a result, the increase in a defective gene in a population does not necessarily (in fact, rarely) lower the average genetic fitness of the entire population. This is because people with defective genes are less successful at reproduction and their defective genes are not "averaged" into the genes of other members of the population. For example, people with intellectual impairments, severe mental illness, and physical ailments with a genetic basis are LESS likely to produce children than people without defective genes. Therefore, their defective genes cannot swamp the gene pool of the entire population. If this was not true, then Darwinian evolution would be impossible.
As for diseases of old age that are associated with genetic conditions (this may include cardiovascular problems, Alzheimer's disease, and some kinds of cancer), the extended longevity of post-reproductive persons doesn't affect the gene pool in any direct way. Therefore, from the perspective of maintaining the fitness of the gene pool, it doesn't matter how long we keep those old folks alive
Therefore, the argument in favor of eugenics is more weak than it initially appears. As a matter of fact, the application of eugenics may decrease the fitness of the gene pool in the long run by decreasing the genetic diversity of the population. Thus, eugenics could decrease the ability of the human population to adapt to new environmental or social conditions. And sometimes defective genes, if they are not too severe, provide useful stepping stones to beneficial mutations that are less likely to occur without the prior existence of defective genes. The road to increased genetic fitness is not necessarily simple and straight.
What you are saying, as I understand you, is that survival of the fittest still operates despite modern medicine. Agreed. But it doesn’t operate in the same brutally efficient way as prior to the introduction of modern medicine, social security for the less fit and talented, etc. does it?
DeleteIt strikes me that that brutal efficiency is needed simply to maintain the quality of the gene pool.
Re your point about diversity, I seem to remember one gets enough diversity for a species to survive as long as the total population is over a few hundred. As to diversity in the form of the presence of defects, I don’t see why that is likely to be an advantage: though in a few rare cases it obviously could be.
"But if not, and if you want the human race to survive, then Eugenics is the only way forward."
ReplyDeleteOr cybernetics.
Likely it will be a politically acceptable combination of all those approaches - screening, gene therapy and cybernetic fixes.