Posted by fschmidt on
URL: https://mikraite.arkian.net/On-Eugenics-tp2265.html

I just finished reading Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction on the history of eugenics.  The surprising thing I learned is that eugenics was basically a progressive movement which was opposed by religious conservatives.  But after thinking about what progressive and conservative really mean, this now makes sense to me.

Eugenics began with Francis Galton.  His view seems quite reasonable, focusing on breeding better people.  Eugenics quickly became politically popular and progressives pushed government eugenics programs that included compulsory sterilization, racial planning, pushing contraception, and pushing feminism (considered to be eugenic).  Of course this contrasts with the current leftist position against eugenics, but this raises the fundamental question of what it really means to be progressive/leftist versus conservative/rightist.

I think the core difference between progressives and conservatives isn't so much their positions on specific issues as it is their general approach to thinking about issues.  Progressives have infinite faith in human reason, so they have no problem using government programs and government coercion to pursue their "logical" goals.  Progressives tend to be reductionist and will reduce an issue to a set of causes and then act on those perceived causes.  In effect, progressives want Man to play God and to micromanage everything.  In contrast, conservatives are more humble and more skeptical about human reason.  Conservatives would rather trust what has proven to be true over time, and would rather trust God or the forces of nature than trust human management.

Now let's apply this to eugenics.  Suppose you wanted to organize a running team.  How do you select members?  The progressive would study running in detail and find everything that may cause good runners, or at least what correlates with good runners.  They may notice, for example, that blacks are faster on average than whites, so they would select blacks.  They may look for genes that are found in fast runners and select people with these genes.  All this fits the progressive approach that I just described.  How would a conservative select team members?  A true conservative would just time candidates and select the fastest ones without worrying about any other factors.  The factors that cause fast runners can be left to God or nature, the conservative doesn't care and just wants fast runners.  Jesus well expressed this conservative view in Matthew 7:16-20.

We can take this one step further and ask how can one breed a population of fast runners.  The answers would again be like what I just described, with progressives using complex reductionist approaches, while conservatives would just add fast runners to the breeding group, and remove slow runners.

I am purely a conservative and I detest the progressive approach to everything.  The general view on eugenics is that the Nazis ruined the reputation of eugenics and this is why it lost favor.  But my view is that the progressives had already ruined eugenics before the Nazis and that the conservative opposition (especially Catholic opposition) to eugenics was based on eugenicists playing God.  I don't think these conservatives opposed animal breeding and I don't think they would have opposed a conservative form of eugenics which would be similar to animal breeding.

My Arkian Ethnicity idea is essentially an intentional eugenic ethnicity.  Its eugenic methods are extremely conservative, more conservative than any other eugenic proposal that I have seen.  These methods involve no coercion and try to avoid reductionism as much as possible.  One example of avoiding reductionism is not using IQ tests for selection.  IQ was very popular among eugenicists but is flawed exactly because it only tests one factor.  Real natural selection always tests whether a combination of factors can produce the desired result.  This why the Arkian approach uses Go as a test instead of IQ, because Go tests for intelligence and many other talents in combination to judge how mentally effective a person is overall.  The other two selection criteria test for religiousness and ethnocentrism which are critical factors for members of such a group.  Of course, like the runners example above, the Arkian approach ignores race and individual genes.

I wish had a time machine so that I could be back in time to before humanity became retarded and propose the Arkian idea to people with enough intelligence to understand it.  In today's idiocracy, explaining the Arkian approach is challenging to say the least.  Those few people left who support eugenics tend to focus on genetic engineering or race, neither of which will work.  Today's conservatives tend to accept modern idiocracy as the will of God, and they tend to be idiots themselves.  The only good news is that the Arkian idea would only need a very few people to work, and this would produce a eugenic group that could escape idiocracy.