In 1851 Francis Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin went to South-West Africa to observe the natives. It was at this time that he began to develop a new view on human heredity.He developed ‘”eugenics:” the idea that selective breeding would improve the genetic pool. His hope was to produce a master race of people who could withstand the attack of pathogens. It is important to put this into context. One hundred years ago, eugenics was cuttiing edge science.
In 1884 the Germans, following in the footsteps of the British and French, went to Africa to claim land. The British brought transportation and schools,and the French brought medicine. In 1885 Heinrich Ernst Goring, father of Hermann of the SS,became Reich Commissioner of the South-West Africa, today’s Namibia. It became common knowledge, to the whites, that they were superior to blacks.In 1893 the Germans began plans to take over the land with German farmers after removing the aboriginal people.
Galton wrote that he “had seen enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest of my life.” And later in life, he wrote a novel, Kantsaywhere, which imagines a eugenicist in utopia. Here having children was not a right. Reproduction was contingent upon pasisng certain tests. “The propagation of children by the Unfit is looked upon… as a crime to the State.”
More recently,Julian Savulescu, a neuroethicist at the University of Oxford suggests reviving “good eugenics.” He says the information from the human genome project makes it a moral imperative to produce children with the best genes possible. He follows on the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991) an Episcopal priest who taught Christian ethics at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge Massachusetts and Harvard Divinity School. “The world no longer needs all the individuals we are capable of bringing into it-especially those who are unable to compete and are an unhappy burden to others. If the size of our families must be limited, surely we are entitled to children who are healthy rather than defective.”
He also wrote that families with genetic abnormalities have a “responsibility for quality in their offspring and of obligation to the community’s interest,” not to pass down that genetic error. What constitutes a genetic error? Missing a limb? Cleft palate? Down syndrome? Autism? And who will be the arbiter of these decisions as we learn more about our genes and heredity?
It is hubris on our part, only a century away from Galton and a little less from Nazi Germany, where Kantsaywhere, was taken to its final end,to think that we can avoid the same path. We cannot start with rules and not stretch them, break them. There will always be someone, in the name of rights, to push the boundaries at the beginning and end of life. History shows us that we cannot stop ourselves.
The information regarding Goring, Galton, South-West Africa and eugenics comes from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization; The West and the Rest, p176-7
