The academic cum scientific consensus supporting eugenics was once as widespread as the academic cum scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change is today.
I point this out , despite the fact that I do personally believe human activity is altering the climate and I do not believe that the concepts fit and unfit can ever be anything other than temporary and relative labels in a particular circumstance.
Just as the concepts of "inevitably left wing universities" or "inevitably right wing universities" are equally fleeting when set against the breath of time and were highly dependent on particular circumstances to be accurate.
Once , in many cities the only polling precincts that FDR ever lost were the university precincts - whereas today the only precincts won by losing Democrats in many cities are the university precincts.
Politics in the UK before our current era of post-modernism revealed much the same thing - the weakest seats for Labor used to be the university ridings.
Widespread groupthink (consensus) , particularly one that finds favour among the powerful , can always benefit from a ton of criticism by misfits, the unfit, the non-conformist, the naysayer and doubter, the gadfly, iconoclast and the deviant.
And if that consensus has a core of merit it will survive --- and in an improved form.
But when the current academic cum scientific consensus was that all such critics are ipso facto 'useless mouths' and 'life unworthy of life', as in the case of attempts to criticize eugenic modernity, what we have here sir is global groupthink on bad acid and in spades.
Under such circumstances , genuine differences of opinion become genetic-ized and biological-ized such that anyone who does not agree that only heterosexual married families with kids are 'normal' is probably themself a genetic deviant homosexual and shouldn't be allowed to reproduce -- let alone argue their case.
Similarly, capitalists and racists removed any potential criticism from the poor and minorities in advance by regarding them all as biologically unfit and hence unworthy of life let alone the right to criticize.
Eugenic supporters described many - quite openly - as biologically 'unfit'.
But eugenic supporters failed to admit that they also regarded these biologically 'unfit' as 'unfitting-in' with white Anglo Saxon Protestant middle class values - of not being team players in the great groupthink....
No comments:
Post a Comment