tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post4509766247994048266..comments2024-03-27T09:14:27.496+00:00Comments on All That Is Solid ...: The Conservative Party's Eugenics ProblemPhilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298147857234479278noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-2578573598623813542018-01-27T02:33:16.992+00:002018-01-27T02:33:16.992+00:00If the ruling class really believed their children...If the ruling class really believed their children to be so superior to those of the plebs why do they spend so much money on private education? Surely the race of genii require no schooling at all....Keithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00769952853595228563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-62598828894765320712018-01-20T09:22:17.606+00:002018-01-20T09:22:17.606+00:00While I agree with the thrust of what you are sayi...While I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, you are bending the definition of eugenics to breaking point. Social engineering is more like it.<br /><br />Eugenics may rear it's ugly head alongside demonisation of poverty but it's quite specifically the biological eradication of "lesser genes" from the wider pool. Its important to be clear on this as eugenics utterly wrong scientifically as well as morally, thereby giving it no hiding place in debate. <br /><br />Population "fitness" technically goes up with more genetic diversity (fitness being the resilience of a population to a changed environment). So even where people can link a trait to genes, eradication reduces genetic diversity thereby harming a population: even harmful mutants can be lifesavers in the right context e.g. sickle cell.JGiftmacherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01963822810587617009noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-81292009296561386862018-01-19T19:55:18.304+00:002018-01-19T19:55:18.304+00:00Nikolas Rose has a good discussion of eugenics in ...Nikolas Rose has a good discussion of eugenics in chapter 2 of his 'The Politics of Life Itself'. Although he contrasts 'eugenics' as 'calculated attempts to improve the quality of the nation or race through acting on reproduction' with the more 'molecular' biopower which he argues operates through strategies of self-government linked to choice and self-fulfilment. (Rose, 2006). Thomasnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-22111174938755930662018-01-19T19:27:04.339+00:002018-01-19T19:27:04.339+00:00Infanticide by exposure (or neglect) in ancient Gr...Infanticide by exposure (or neglect) in ancient Greece was commonplace - because of the lack of reliable contraception - but it was generally applied to children considered superfluous, rather than "sub-optimal", with a clear bias against girls. <br /><br />Sparta was considered atypical in that it would expose boys considered unlikely to become hoplites as well, though what mainly offended contemporaries about this practice was that the decision was reserved to the state rather than the father. NB: Those boys were well born, not helots (i.e. working class).<br /><br />To repeat, eugenics as a class project is a product of the late 19th century, and thus the emergence of classes as we understand them. It only arises once labour is conceptualised as a factor of production that requires (and is capable of) scientific improvement. <br /><br />Though eugenics is popularly associated with traditional techniques of agricultural stock management (e.g. selective breeding), it is really geared to industrial stock management (standardisation, measurement etc), hence modern eugenics has moved on from simple heritability to bio-engineering and chemical intervention - e.g. Toby Young's interest in IQ-enhancing drugs.<br /><br />If we think of eugenics as one end of a spectrum, the other end is represented by liberal fretting over productivity and poor educational achievement by the "white working class". NB: Many early eugenicists were political progressives, such as the Fabians. David Timoneyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-32131432191067524702018-01-19T17:17:09.967+00:002018-01-19T17:17:09.967+00:00Before WW2 eugenics was mainstream science support...Before WW2 eugenics was mainstream science supported and funded by government and academia. After WW2 nobody was a eugenicist and nobody had really believed in it.<br />http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-48115319831359248632018-01-19T15:24:11.874+00:002018-01-19T15:24:11.874+00:00In reply to Dermot above, the tripartite education...In reply to Dermot above, the tripartite education system, with its use of psychometric testing (the notorious 11+), was introduced by Labour's Minister of Education, 'Red' Ellen Wilkinson in 1945. The idea of three distinctive types of secondary school: grammar schools and technical schools (for the top 20%) and secondary moderns (for the rest) was certainly NOT integral to the 1944 Education Act, brought in by the Coalition government during the war. It was a Labour government under Wilkinson who sent out Circular 73 in December 1945 to all local education authorities advising them to take the tripartite route. A booklet accompanying the circular notes that secondary modern schools would be for working class children 'whose future employment would not demand any measure of technical skill or knowledge.'<br /><br />However, it is not surprising that Wilkinson took this decision. The inter-war Labour party and the liberal left in general was infused with eugenicist ideas (Fabian society, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, J.B.S. Haldane, William Beveridge, Marie Stopes etc. were all well-known eugenicists). Wilkinson went against the membership of the Labour Party, who were mostly appalled by ideas that underpinned the tripartite system but she was supported by the Spens Report (1938) and the Norwood Report, which stated that there were ‘three types of mind’ natural to all children, who had a ‘fixed maximum ability’.<br /><br />These eugenicist ideas still lie at the heart of our education system. It is still seen as ‘common sense’ by politicians/parents/teachers that some children are born ‘talented’ and other are not. See Dorling & Tomlinson (2017) http://www.jceps.com/archives/3204.<br />Dialectician1noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-43249047332928527162018-01-19T15:14:03.410+00:002018-01-19T15:14:03.410+00:00I thought it might be worth mentioning two of the ...I thought it might be worth mentioning two of the recent Tory policies that seem relevant to eugenics. The most blatant being the restriction of child tax credits to only the first two children, and the other being the benefits cap, which discriminates against larger families. Both give the message that it is socially irresponsible for low income people to breed excessively and, if they do, they will not be supported by the state - even if it means the children will grow up in poverty.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-17077170416080238482018-01-19T10:49:10.227+00:002018-01-19T10:49:10.227+00:00The New Labour connection is significant and troub...The New Labour connection is significant and troubling (although it complicates your genealogy). I'd go so far as to say that the roots of today's murderous welfare conditionality system lie in the New Labour period, not in Thatcherism. It was New Labour, not the Tories, who proposed tying welfare eligibility to good citizenship under the banner of 'community', on the basis that those who didn't "work hard and play by the rules" were effectively excluding themselves from the community of respectable citizens and deserved to receive nothing from it. (I wrote about this in a collection called <i>Remoralizing Britain?</i>.)<br /><br />It's not a million miles from the eugenicist ideas of someone like H.G. Wells, who wrote (in 1932): "The world and its future is not for feeble folk any more than it is for selfish folk. It is not for the multitude but for the best". I guess there's a strand of 'leftism' that didn't fall so far from the technocratic/managerial tree.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-9096022227443994762018-01-19T09:18:32.928+00:002018-01-19T09:18:32.928+00:00David, the Romans and Spartans regularly exposed, ...David, the Romans and Spartans regularly exposed, selected-out, sub-optimal infants, if we are to take Phil's definition. <br /><br />Dermot, of course the other way to look at it would be that they were trying to give working class kids a leg up, albeit it in an imperfect way (and to serve the interests of their class). <br /><br />Comprehensive education on the other hand is said to be the great leveller, yet we live in a less socially mobile society than 50 years ago... <br /><br />I agree with Phil which is that you have to begin with the bottom and look upwards. What would truly serve the interest of the working class? Well, you could start by banning private education and creating a truly equal and meritocratic school system (but when, Phil, would you risk crossing your line and promoting "bourgeois values"?!). Speedynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-53235667585046085782018-01-19T07:36:17.510+00:002018-01-19T07:36:17.510+00:00Interesting article (although I'm not sure you...Interesting article (although I'm not sure your definition of eugenics would stand up in court). <br /><br />The worst European offender for "traditional" eugenics was pseudo-socialist Sweden which sterilised 21,000 people up until 1975. Then there was of course Mrs Gandhi... <br /><br />"They were (and are) instruments for the moral improvement of the working class, defined and devised entirely from above."<br /><br />This is a troublesome assertion because surely any top-down policy aimed at improving lives could be described thus? I know you're a supporter of universal income, but have you considered there can be such a thing is too much "free" money? My view is that the benefits system is used to sustain capitalism, pacifying the people for whom it has no place - it was no coincidence that under Thatcher an extra two million were signed onto disability, a good way of keeping them off the unemployment register and, essentially, paying them to keep quiet. It is sad that the "left" has come to fetishise benefits and sneer at equality of opportunity - sometimes it seems that the only good working class person is one on benefits. <br /><br />Of course there are millions who require help from the state, but that does not mean that there are also many others who are spiritually impoverished by it (I have seen it in my own family). The concept of contributing to society has always been central to socialism, and I believe you see yourself as a socialist. I sense in your distate for top down solutions a sense that the only good working class person is one who knows his or her place and has not inculcated "bourgeois" values at a Sure Start. That seems very paternalistic and "top down" to me.<br /><br />Speedynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-35528164375634257592018-01-19T03:19:21.041+00:002018-01-19T03:19:21.041+00:00QUOTE: The tripartite education system, for exampl...QUOTE: The tripartite education system, for example, was explicitly designed to select for nascent bourgeois qualities among working class kids and socially separate them out during their secondary schooling. UNQUOTE<br /><br />Makes sense; I'd like to hear more about this, if you can.dermothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10814535373795945000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-62117940556724002132018-01-19T00:31:43.443+00:002018-01-19T00:31:43.443+00:00There are no classical roots to eugenics. The Grec...There are no classical roots to eugenics. The Greco-Roman idea of excellence (arete) assumed a stasis in which the individual distinguished himself (it was usually a him) from the mass. Without the continued presence of those lacking in excellence, distinction would be impossible.<br /><br />The ideas of racial hygiene and national homogeneity arise less than 150 years ago and are bound up with imperialism and the political response to democracy. In many ways Nazism was an anachronism.<br /><br />Francis Galton's use of Greek was simply an attempt to provide a spurious lineage and respectability for a concept that was the product of an industrial society that feared "the common man".<br /><br />It is important to realise that eugenic ideas have only ever been advocated by a minority over a very short period of history. There is a big difference between the persistent contempt for the mass and the advocacy of their extermination or generic re-engineering.David Timoneyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com