What do we do when science goes bad?
Beginning in the early twentieth century, America experience saw the rise of eugenics, which at its roots means “good creation,” through figures such as Francis Galton. Knighted in 1909, Galton was English anthropologist, explorer, half cousin of Charles Darwin. He was known for his pioneering studies of human intelligence and was in fact the first person to coin the term eugenics, the practices and beliefs that aim at improving the genetic quality—the physical and mental composition—of human populations through intention breeding and selective parenthood. Scientific support for eugenics, in the rhetorica of its promoters, was offered by evolutionary thought.
In the United States, the eugenics movement took root in the early 1900s, led by the leading biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) who in 1910 founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island with the explicit intention “to improve the natural, physical, mental, and temperamental qualities of the human family.”
Irving Fischer (interestingly the son of a Congregationalist pastor) preached that Americans “must make of eugenics a religion.” In 1915, at the Race Betterment Conference, Fischer presented a talk entitled—with language clearly appropriated from the Gospel: “Eugenics—Foremost Plan of Human Redemption.”
Around that time, the literary giant D. H. Lawrence offered the disturbing fantasy of extermination:
“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile at me.” D. H. Lawrence’s 1908That’s quite simply horrifying.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the power of CRISPR gene editing makes this even more concerning today. The power of these genetic technologies has arrived with a notable cost-benefit. As our ability to modify human genetics increases, we could also weed out putatively undesirable traits like Down Syndrome, or they could again be applied against “inferior” races. And the rise of white nationalism makes this notion seem not entirely implausible.
But I’ll leave it there.
The question we have to ask is, How do we respond when science goes bad?
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