Eugenics: What’s Wrong With It?

T.M. Goddard has replied to my two blog posts “The Alt-Right and Abortion” and “The Pro-Choice Temptation” over at Radix Journal.

At the outset, I will say that I agree this is an important debate, and that I am the last person to take any of this personally. I’ve spent the last hour or so reading through some of my old posts about eugenics. A decade ago, I agreed with many of the things that are being said about eugenics at Radix and Counter-Currents. In fact, I was really into this stuff and spent a lot of time researching and arguing about the matter.

Those who have I known in cyberspace the longest are probably getting a real kick out of this debate. Hopefully, I’m a bit older and wiser now. I’ve become a parent. I gave up on the Nietzschean superman a long time ago. I was wrong about eugenics. Right now, I just want to leave behind a better world for my children.

Abortion Rates & Absolute Numbers

Let’s engage in a thought experiment.

In this simple thought experiment, we will just assume that the 55.7 million who were aborted between 1973 and 2013 had lived. We will welcome them all back, factor them into the present day population, and see how much of a difference it makes.

Non-Hispanic Whites – 196,817,552 (63.7%)
Blacks – 37,685,848 (12.2%)
Hispanics – 50,477,594 (16.5%)
Others – 23,282,968 (7.5%)
Total: 308,745,538 (100%)

That’s the racial breakdown of the United States in 2010. This will be slightly off because the abortion numbers run to 2013. It won’t make much of a difference though. Now lets assign the aborted 55.7 million to their respective census category:

Non-Hispanic Whites – 224,717,552 (+27.9 million)
Blacks – 54,885,848 (+17.2 million)
Hispanics – 58,277,594 (+7.8 million)
Others – 26,082,969 (+2.8 million)
Total: 364,445,528

Welcome back, y’all.

I already feel A LOT better about it now that 27.9 million of my White peers weren’t aborted. All of y’all got the chance to grow up, have families of your own, and live out your dreams like we the living. Maybe some of you had the chance to become the next Issac Newton or William Shockley. Without 40 years of abortion, America is now approximately 61.6% White, 15.06% Black, 15.99 Hispanic, and 7.15% Other.

Some of you black boys and girls didn’t make it though. We assumed in this scenario that all of you lived to adulthood, but the black infant mortality rate is twice the White infant mortality rate. Quite a few of you died before you ever made it to your first birthday and many more of you died for various reasons in childhood:

Abortion & White Demographic Decline

There appears to be some confusion on this point.

I don’t believe Roe v. Wade caused the demographic decline of the White population. In “The Alt-Right and Abortion,” I explicitly said otherwise and said it was a net racial wash. Instead, I was taking issue with the “we’re being swamped” argument. It seems to me a bit exaggerated. That’s why I posted the racial demographics of every state in America in 1970. We managed to hit our racial highwater mark when abortion was illegal while presumably the black horde was overrunning America.

I’m just saying it is another Chicken Little argument – even Alabama hit 74% White in 1970 – like the dysgenic threat posed those with Down Syndrome.

Birth Control Causes Falling White Birth Rates

I agree 100 percent.

In “The Alt-Right and Abortion,” I said that birth control was responsible for Europe’s unfolding demographic disaster. Pat Buchanan wrote a book about, The Death of the West, which triggered my awakening.

Now I am going to do something that I rarely do on this blog: when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Germany had been in demographic decline for decades. Hitler had some innovative solutions to this problem and succeeded in reversing Germany’s stagnant birthrate. It is something we ought to take a look at:

“Ostensibly, the Lebensborn Society – literally translated Lebensborn means “fount” or “source, of life” – had been founded in 1935 as a sort of welfare organization, funded by the Nazi Party, to run maternity homes across Germany; it was set up in response to what was rapidly becoming a demographic crisis for the new Reich. When Hitler came to power in the 1930s, the country’s population had been falling for decades. In 1900 the statistics showed an average birth per thousand of 35.8; by 1932 that had dropped to 14.7. From the outset the Nazi regime set out to stop – and then reverse – the trend.

They began with innocent-sounding slogans – “Restoring the family to its rightful place” was typical – and then introduced financial incentives – marriage loans, child subsidies, and family allowances – to have a large family. A cult of motherhood was also formally established; every year on the birthday of Hitler’s own mother, fertile women were awarded the Honor Cross of the German Mother. Those who produced more than four children were given a bronze medal; more than six earner silver, with gold being awarded to those who had more than eight. When this didn’t produce results quickly enough, new laws were introduced to ban the advertisement and display of contraceptives and all birth control clinics were shut down. Abortions were criminalized as “acts of sabotage against Germany’s racial future.”

It was this phrase – “racial future” – that was the first clue to the reality behind the seemingly innocuous Lebensborn Society. Although the ostensible aim of the homes was to allow women who might otherwise abort their pregnancy to give birth in safety and in secret – thus helping to boost Germany’s population – they weren’t open to everyone.”

This sounds like our crisis pregnancy centers. Bachelors were taxed in the Third Reich:

“Even sharper measures prevailed after May 1933, and the number of abortions sank after laws preventing “acts of sabotage against Germany’s racial future” were enacted. Birth control clinics were closed and children, church, kitchen became the slogan of the thousand year Reich. A bachelor tax was enacted. There were loans to newlyweds, as well as allowances and child subsidies to parents with large families.”

Women caught trying to induce abortions faced anywhere from a day to five years in prison. In 1943, abortion became a capital crime in Hitler’s Germany. After a late start, the National Socialists also cracked down on homosexuality:

“On June 28, 1935, the Ministry of Justice revised Paragraph 175. The revisions provided a legal basis for extending Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Ministry officials expanded the category of “criminally indecent activities between men” to include any act that could be construed as homosexual. The courts later decided that even intent or thought sufficed. On October 26, 1936, Himmler formed within the Security Police the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. Josef Meisinger, executed in 1947 for his brutality in occupied Poland, led the new office. The police had powers to hold in protective custody or preventive arrest those deemed dangerous to Germany’s moral fiber, jailing indefinitely—without trial—anyone they chose. In addition, homosexual prisoners just released from jail were immediately re-arrested and sent to concentration camps if the police thought it likely that they would continue to engage in homosexual acts.

From 1937 to 1939, the peak years of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the police increasingly raided homosexual meeting places, seized address books, and created networks of informers and undercover agents to identify and arrest suspected homosexuals. On April 4, 1938, the Gestapo issued a directive indicating that men convicted of homosexuality could be incarcerated in concentration camps. Between 1933 and 1945 the police arrested an estimated 100,000 men as homosexuals. Most of the 50,000 men sentenced by the courts spent time in regular prisons, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were interned in concentration camps. …”

Why doesn’t the Alt-Right give Hitler credit where it is so obviously due?

Eugenics or Eugenic Effects

Borrowing another idea from Germany, I don’t see why we couldn’t make college largely tuition free. Whether that would be advisable in the present context is debatable. As I noted above, Hitler’s Germany made extensive use of loans to newlyweds, child subsidies, and allowances to boost the German birthrate. American conservatives like Kevin Williamson would certainly decry this as “welfare.”

Ubermensch and Untermensch

Since eugenics is so obviously the crux of this whole debate, which isn’t so much about abortion as it is about counter-signaling to American conservatives and daydreaming about Nietzschean supermen, let’s run through what is wrong with eugenics:

1.) Identity – As I said in the abortion thread, “identity” is the big new thing on the Alt-Right. The internet is suddenly full of “identitarians” who believe in, I guess, the “preservation and development of ethnic and cultural identity as its central ideological principle, and criticizes the state of the contemporary West.”

Here is a beauty of a statement from our comment section which illustrates the tension between the Alt-Right’s focus on identity and eugenics: “Brown and underclass whites are our demographic enemies no matter what their sex is.” See also this one: “We all know that there are some whites who might as well be black. They’re not helping us out as a race any more than libtard whites are.”

There goes “White identity” swirling down the eugenicist drain. Like I said in the abortion thread, there are plenty of eugenicists who believe White working class children – the Untermensch – don’t even deserve to live.

2.) Racial Hatred – You have probably heard the “identitarians” claim that they are not motivated by racial hatred. Instead, they claim to be driven by the desire to preserve their own nation and to nurture a healthy, positive sense of ethnic and culture identity in their communities. But is this true?

Here is another gem from our comment section: “Why is it ok to sacrifice healthy, patriotic white men (who pass asvaab, fitness tests, and basic training, and in whom we have invested heavily into educating in public schools at10K/yr x 13yrs=$130K) in warfare (even if it is a just war) but not ok to sacrifice a fetus of unknown merit and in whom we have not heavily invested taxpayer money?”

The eugenicist logic on display here is that it is okay to sacrifice an unborn White child in order to kill two Black children. That’s a net demographic victory. It is also clearly no longer pro-White. If you would sacrifice members of your own folk community for the sake of killing others, your true motivation is a desire to eliminate other races.

3.) Supremacy – Are we motivated by a belief that we are superior to other races? Do we divide our nation into the Ubermensch and the Untermensch? Alternatively, are we motivated by a desire to preserve our own people and way of life?

Nothing draws out the implicit supremacy lurking in identitarianism like discussions of eugenics: “For eugenic purposes, it might be very useful to fertilize a dozen eggs, sequence their genomes, choose only to implant the best, and wash the rest down the drain” or “While it’s true that a blanket ban on abortion would probably increase the White population in there numbers, it would, no doubt, decrease the overall quality, as well and leave all races stupider, more criminally prone, and more diseased” or “However, all things being equal, I would prefer a society populated by attractive, healthy, and intelligent people—rather than the ugly, sick, and stupid.”

In other words, the eugenicist believes in diagnosing the less intelligent, the less attractive, the less healthy and so forth as the Untermensch, and deeming them unworthy of life. Rather than accepting these people as members of our nation or folk community, and believing there is nothing necessarily wrong with them, eugenicists want to eradicate them from the White gene pool – divisive much?

4.) Traditionalism – Are we modernists or traditionalists?

Eugenicists are hyper-modernists. Listening to them talk, you can’t help but wonder what would happen to the organic bonds that are the foundation of nationalism in such a world. You would have parents killing their own children. You would have crackpots diagnosing much of our population as unfit to live or reproduce. You would have the government trying to arrange marriages in order to breed the population like barnyard animals. You would have parents competing with each other in order to have the income to go to the local eugenicist and get the next “killer app” or “upgrade” installed in their unborn child.

The traditional family would be dead as a doornail in such a world. The feeling of belonging to the same nation would certainly be as well.

5.) Ethics – I’m not sure who else feels this way, but I believe that the foundation of our entire cause is the moral duty we owe to our ancestors to preserve our heritage and pass on their legacy to future generations. When you cross the Rubicon and go into the business of exterminating the next generation for whatever reason (whether it is to breed a superior race or because you are too irresponsible to care for your own child), you have thrown our cause into the wind and perverted it into its polar opposite.

6.) Religion – To even get to such a point, traditional religion would certainly have to die in this country and be replaced by a spiritual worldview based on racial materialism. Given the fact that eugenics is so strongly correlated with childlessness and homosexuality, you have to wonder if such a worldview is even viable as a demographic proposition. Is it even capable of sustaining itself when its acolytes are unable to?

7.) Breeding – Assuming that humans could be bred like animals, why would we even want to do it? Humanity has domesticated all kinds of plant and animal species. In the process, we have generally made them more useful to us, but also weaker, more docile and inferior to their wild counterparts.

8.) Imperfections – The desire to stamp out out the unfit is driven by a desire to achieve a kind of envisioned Platonic ideal, but genetic mutations (and those who suffer from them) are a natural and inevitable byproduct of evolution. The same is true of the diversity within our own race and species.

9.) Lack of Knowledge – Like their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s who thought complex traits followed simple Mendelian inheritance patterns, the crackpots who want to embark on this adventure – which is certain to destroy the social fabric of the nation – aren’t even anywhere close to knowing how to achieve their ends.

10.) Liberal Eugenics – If you want to know just how bad an idea combining liberalism with eugenics is, check out Lee Silver’s Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family:

“A Glimpse of Things to Come

Dateline Boston: June 1, 2010

Sometime in the not-so-distant future, you may visit the maternity ward at a major university hospital to see the newborn child or grandchild of a close friend. The new mother, let’s call her Barbara, seems very much at peace with the world, sitting in a chair quietly nursing her baby, Max. Her labor was — in the parlance of her doctor — “uneventful,” and she is looking forward to raising her first child. You decide to make pleasant conversation by asking Barbara whether she knew in advance that her baby was going to be a boy. In your mind, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question since doctors have long given prospective parents the option of learning the sex of their child-to-be many months before the predicted date of birth. But Barbara seems taken aback by the question. “Of course I knew Max would be a boy,” she tells you. “My husband Dan and I chose him from the embryos we made. And when I’m ready to go through this again, I’ll choose a girl to be my second child. An older son and a younger daughter — the perfect family.”

Now, it’s your turn to be taken aback. “You made a conscious choice to have a boy rather than a girl?” you ask.

“Absolutely!” Barbara answers. “And while I was at it, I made sure that Max wouldn’t turn out to be fat like my brother Tom or addicted to alcohol like Dan’s sister Karen. It’s not that I am personally biased or anything,” Barbara continues defensively. “I just wanted to make sure that Max would have the greatest chance for achieving success. Being overweight or alcoholic would clearly be a handicap.”

You look down in wonderment at the little baby boy destined to be moderate in both size and drinking habits.

Max has fallen asleep in Barbara’s arms, and she places him gently in his bassinet. He wears a contented smile, which evokes a similar smile from his mother. Barbara feels the urge to stretch her legs and asks whether you’d like to meet some of the new friends she’s made during her brief stay at the hospital. You nod, and the two of you walk into the room next door where a thirty-five-year old woman named Cheryl is resting after giving birth to a nine-pound baby girl named Rebecca.

Barbara introduces you to Cheryl as well as a second woman named Madelaine, who stands by the bed holding Cheryl’s hand. Little Rebecca is lying under the gaze of both Cheryl and Madelaine. “She really does look like both her mothers doesn’t she?” Barbara asks you.

Barbara asks you to explain. “Yes. You see Cheryl and Madelaine have been living together for eight years. They got married in Hawaii soon after it became legal there, and like most married couples, they wanted to bring a child into the world with a combination of both their bloodlines. With the reproductive technologies available today, they were able to fulfill their dreams.”

You look across the room at the happy little nuclear family — Cheryl, Madelaine, and baby Rebecca — and wonder how the hospital plans to fill out the birth certificate.”

Aww … how sweet! A little angel with two lesbians as her biological mothers.

“Dateline USA: May 15, 2350

It is now three hundred years later and although you are long since gone, a number of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are now alive, mostly unbeknownst to one another. The United States of America still exists, but it is a different place from the one familiar to you. The most striking difference is that the extreme polarization of society that began during the 1980s has now reached its logical conclusion, with all people belonging to one of two classes. The people of one class are referred to as Naturals, while those in the second class are called the Gene-enriched or simply the GenRich.

These new classes of society cut across what used to be traditional racial and ethnic lines. In fact, so much mixing has occurred during the last three hundred years that sharp divisions according to race — black versus white versus Asian — no longer exist. Instead, the American populace has finally become the racial melting pot that earlier leaders had long hoped for. The skin color of Americans comes in all shades from African brown to Scandinavian pink, and traditional Asian facial features are present to a greater or lesser extent in a large percentage of Americans as well.

The GenRich — who account for 10 percent of the American population — all carry synthetic genes. Genes that were created in the laboratory and did not exist within the human species until twenty-first century reproductive geneticists began to put them there. The GenRich are a modern day hereditary class of genetic aristocrats.

Some of the synthetic genes carried by present-day members of the GenRich class were already carried by their parents. These genes were transmitted to today’s GenRich the old-fashioned way, from parent to child through sperm or egg. These were placed into GenRich embryos through the application of genetic engineering techniques shortly after conception.

The GenRich class is anything but homogenous. There are many types of GenRich families, and many subtypes within each type. For example, there are GenRich athletes who can trace their descent back to professional sports players from the twenty-first century. One subtype of GenRich athlete is the GenRich football player, and a sub-subtype is the GenRich running back. Embryo selection techniques have been used to make sure that a GenRich running back has received all of the natural genes that made his unenhanced foundation ancestor excel at the position. But in addition, at each generation beyond the foundation ancestor, sophisticated genetic enhancements have accumulated so that the modern-day GenRich running back can perform in a way not conceivable for any unenhanced Natural. Of course, all professional baseball, football, and basketball players are special GenRich subtypes. After three hundred years of selection and enhancement, these GenRich individuals all have athletic skills that are clearly “nonhuman” in the traditional sense. It would be impossible for any Natural to compete.

Another GenRich type is the GenRich scientist. Many of the synthetic genes carried by the GenRich scientist are the same as those carried by all other members of the GenRich class, including some that enhance a variety of physical and mental attributes, as well as others that provide resistance to all known forms of human disease. But in addition, the present-day GenRich scientist has accumulated a set of particular synthetic genes that work together with his “natural” heritage to produce an enhanced scientific mind. Although the GenRich scientist may appear to be different from the GenRich athlete, both GenRich types have evolved by a similar process. The foundation ancestor for the modern GenRich scientist was a bright twenty-first century scientist who could produce even more brilliant children. There are numerous other GenRich types including GenRich businessmen, GenRich musicians, GenRich artists, and even GenRich intellectual generalists who all evolved in the same way.

Not all present-day GenRich individuals can trace their foundation ancestors back to the twenty-first century, when genetic enhancement was first perfected. During the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries, some Natural families garnered the financial wherewithal required to place their children in the GenRich class. But with the passage of time, the genetic distance between the Naturals and the GenRich has become greater and greater, and now there is little movement up from the Natural to GenRich class. It seems fair to say that society is on the verge of reaching the final point of complete polarization.

All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by the members of the GenRich class. GenRich parents can afford to send their children to private schools rich in the resources required for them to take advantage of their enhanced genetic potential. In contrast, Naturals work as low-paid service providers or as laborers, and their children go to public schools. But twenty-fourth century public schols have little in common with their predecessors from the twentieth century. Funds for public education have declined steadily since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and now Natural children are only taught the basic skills they need to perform the kinds of tasks they’ll encounter in the jobs available to members of their class.

There is still some intermarriage as well as sexual intermingling between a few GenRich individuals and Naturals. But, as one might imagine, GenRich parents put intense pressure on their children not to dilute their expensive genetic endowment in this way. And as time passes, the mixing of the classes will become less and less frequent for reasons of both environment and genetics.

The environmental reason is clear enough: GenRich and Natural children grow up and live in segregated social worlds where there is little chance for contact between them. The genetic reason, however, was unanticipated.

It is obvious to everyone that with each generation of genetic enhancement, the genetic distance separating the GenRich and Naturals is growing larger and larger. But a startling consequence of the expanding genetic distance has just come to light. In a nationwide survey of the few interclass GenRich-Natural couples that could be identified, sociologists have discovered an astounding 90 percent level of infertility. Reproductive geneticists have examined these couples and come to the conclusion that the infertility is caused primarily by the incompatibility between the genetic makeup of each member.

Evolutionary biologists have long observed instances in which otherwise fertile individuals taken from two separate populations prove infertile when mated to each other. And they tell the sociologists and reproductive geneticists what is going on: the process of species separation between the GenRich and Naturals has already begun. Together, the sociologists, the reproductive geneticists, and the evolutionary biologists are willing to make the following prediction: If the accumulation of genetic knowledge and advances in genetic enhancement technology continue at the present rate, then by the end of the third millennium, the GenRich class and the Natural class will become the GenRich humans and the Natural humans — entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.”

Doesn’t it sound wonderful?

By this point, we have jettisoned White identity, thrown away our traditions, lost the organic bonds that make up the nation, dissolved the bonds of the family, and we have turned our backs on God and blown apart the ties of kinship that has made us one people. It is highly unlikely to ever happen (Silver’s book was published in 1997 and many predictions have yet to materialize), but that’s the glorious vision!

Note: Wouldn’t it be a much better idea to just to become more religious and have more children? After all, the black birthrate is only 1.90 per woman. Couldn’t we manage with fewer DINKs, homosexuals, and career women?