Follow the Science - Historical Edition

From the National Review: One Hundred Years Ago, ‘Following the Science’ Meant Supporting Eugenics

In the early 20th Century Eugenics was the Science of the Day™. G.K. Chesterton had other ideas.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which eugenics captured the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term — from the Greek for “good birth” — argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted. Anticipating public opposition, Galton told scientific gatherings that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience like a new religion.” Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, preached the eugenics gospel: They held conferences, published papers, provided research funding, and advocated for sterilization laws.

To many thinkers in the West, the catastrophe of the First World War, in addition to the problems of poverty, crime, and social breakdown, suggested a sickness in the racial stock. Book titles help tell the story: Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1922 — the same year Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils — was supported by Nobel Prize–winning scientists whose stated objective was to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population.

It would take the revelations of what the Nazis had done in the name of eugenics for it fall out of favor. (For a time, anyway; more on that later.)

At the heart of the eugenics movement, Chesterton believed, was an utterly materialistic view of the human person: man as laboratory rat. “Materialism is really our established Church,” he wrote, “for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.”

Incapable of viewing man (anyone you don't personally know, that is) as nothing more than a lab rat.

The inherent worth of a human-life. There isn't one according to the materialistic view. Only your own of course.

Under the eugenics vision, society’s most vulnerable would not find compassion and aid; they would find the surgeon’s knife. As Chesterton quipped, there would be no sympathy for the character of Tiny Tim, the crippled boy of the Cratchit family in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. “The Eugenicist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchit.”

That view of life is making a resurgence. Look at the number of infants taken off life support in the UK. Look at the euthanasia of the elderly in Scandinavia. Because your life has no meaning, and if you are consuming more resources than the .gov thinks is your fair share, well, then it was nice knowing you.

You should click thru just for the quotes from C.S. Lewis, and his predictions for the future. But there are also stats on what the US and state governments did to people in the name of eugenics, and more from Chesterton.