How Not to Argue about Eugenics

Terry Pratchett—whom I have never read—apparently has a book called Death’s Domain, which features a house whose perimeter when measured from the inside is larger than its perimeter when measured from the outside. Spooky! In my aimless grazing through the literature on evolutionary biology, it dawned on me that the topic of eugenics is a little like that house; we have confidently assigned it a particular dimension, declared it uninhabitable, and cordoned it off behind tall walls. But if you jump the gate and poke around inside, you find its wings extend in surprising directions.

To begin with, you are already a practicing eugenicist.

Yes, you! After all, you choose one mate and not another. Or at least, you choose the best that will choose you. But all you really do is steer the pitching bull of your subconscious, which bellows embarrassingly after Pleistocene fetishes. Height, for one. Bilateral symmetry for another. “Major Histocompatibility Complex”, as conveyed by the right underarm odor. If you are a man, a certain hip to waist ratio snares you. If you are a woman, status dazzles you. We all thrill to youth or, as they say, neoteny.

So, we are all guilty of Pleistocene atavism. We all unwittingly prune the ramifying shrub of human diversity. But there is something worse: as a society we choose policies—taking away from Alice, giving to Bob—that have definite genetic consequences. The shrewd are encouraged to have fewer children, the dull to have more. The result? Despite phenotypic (i.e. expressed) intelligence rising through the 20th century as a consequence of better nutrition, intelligence at the level of the genotype has fallen. We are, whether you like it or not, breeding ourselves dumb.

Which demands we ask: if eugenics is bad, how can dysgenics not be worse? We may agree that the topic is odious enough to avoid entirely, but should we not therefore also agree that dysgenic policies must be abandoned? Should our squeamishness about the very topic of breeding not extend to economic policies that affect breeding?

And here we come to the second surprising wing of this capacious topic: what is so odious about eugenics? Comes the sputtering and indignant answer: “Do you even know about eugenics’ sordid past?”. I do, and this is why I find indignation on the topic incoherent.

Imagine if our once-bitten-twice-shy reaction to the single digit millions killed in the name of eugenics were scaled up proportionately to the hundred million or so killed in the name of equality. I mean, seriously imagine it! Phrases like “Sharing is caring” would be considered hate crimes. So much as proposing a municipal park would elicit thundering pronouncements on the “slippery slope to gulags”. Universities would summon phalanxes of grievance counsellors after every anonymous graffito of the Laffer Curve left on a napkin. Every hero of the Left would be cancelled, de-statued, erased.

Now, I’ll admit that this is an indulgent bit of whataboutism, though no less true for being so. But there is a deeper error in our allergy to eugenics, and it is an error that runs through many attempts to draw lessons from the past:

Something that is bad when imposed by the violence of the state is not therefore bad when done consensually. The state is a butcher who uses whatever apron is at hand, and there is hardly an apron—from theism to socialism—he hasn’t spattered in gore. Why, then, blame the apron?

As I said at the outset, you are already, in your love life, a practicing eugenicist, and there is nothing wrong with that. You are, at the ballot box, a practicing dysgenecist, and although you should be ashamed of it, you are not. You are also, in your family relations, a dutiful communist, yet nobody accuses you of inviting a new Holodomor.

What would it mean to have eugenics without the violence of the state? An exotic answer is obviously gene editing, though I gather that this technology is still some way off. A less exotic answer is embryo selection. Conception already entails a holocaust of ejaculate and a lottery winner chosen mostly at random (“mostly”, because sperm motility is heritable). So why not replace the lottery with something closer to an aptitude test? The sooner the affluent learn not to flinch at accusations of “eugenics!”, the sooner this technology can do what all technologies do: get cheap enough to be ubiquitous.

Most prosaic of all, we might shake ourselves from the environmentalist slumber that has stupefied academia since the middle of last century. We might allow our children to know that among the most important factors underlying individual flourishing and individual dysfunction are genes. In a society where high schoolers knew as much about the g loading of intelligence tests as about the pullulating menagerie of personal pronouns, we might restore a lot of discarded wisdom about choosing good in-laws. We might, if we were brave, revive a chauvinism of excellence.