The Dehumanization of Things

      Most Americans know little about the eugenics campaign in our country back in the late 19th century up and through the first third of the 20th.  I don’t ever remember reading about it in a high school or college American history course.  And yet, during the early part of the last century, thousands of people were forcibly institutionalized and many of them were sterilized, often against their will – all to further eugenics.  Legislation was enacted in many states – pressured by the eugenics crusade – to sterilize criminals and the “feebleminded.”

      A rather emblematic story concerning the endeavors of the eugenicists involved Carrie Buck, who was forcibly removed at four years of age from her parents, regarded as they were by the powers-that-be as “unfit,” and was placed in a foster home.  In spite of these difficulties, Carrie did well in school, attended church regularly and sang in two church choirs and proved herself quite capable of many ordinary tasks.  When she turned seventeen, a nephew of her foster parents raped her, and a pregnancy resulted.  Rather than blame the nephew, the foster parents had Carrie committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where it was decided that Carrie, obviously “feebleminded,” should be sterilized.  A court case developed that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where Carrie was “defended” inadequately by a known supporter of eugenics.  In the end, Carrie lost her case to the majority opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a religious skeptic and self-proclaimed Darwinist, with one justice dissenting, Pierce Butler, the bench’s only Roman Catholic.  Holmes summed up his opinion with the ominous words, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

      America was on the cutting edge of this crusade to rid the human race of the “less desirable” through such measures as sterilization, incarceration and the withholding of marriage licenses to those deemed “unfit,” as well as, one knows assuredly, enactment of laws against racially mixed marriages.  The reasoning for all this:  to bolster the seeming waywardness of Darwin’s principle of natural selection/survival of the fittest.  This principle was waning in its efficacy, a signal to the eugenicists that it was time for them to step in with their more advanced expertise. 

      The Nazis were forever grateful and began their own eugenics program in Germany in the 1930s to the praise of one Margaret Sanger, founder of what is now called Planned Parenthood.  The American eugenicists returned the compliments of the Hitlerites with cooperation and congratulations to the Nazis all the way up until 1937, long after many in the world had begun to see the outworking of Hitler’s dark plan.

      Meanwhile, a bit earlier, things were heating up in the USA, with the infamous Scopes Trial – or “Monkey Trial” – in Dayton, Tennessee, a trial pitched by the stage play and film Inherit the Wind as a great battle between redneck fundamentalists and enlightened science.  In contrast to the myth presented by Inherit the Wind, the real story is quite different:  John Scopes was never jailed; his attorneys were never driven out of town; and the ACLU sought Scopes’ prosecution, not creationists.  And, most importantly, the central issue was not Darwinism per se, but rather Scopes’ text book, A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter, whose deductions from Darwinism led him to such delectable notions, presented in this high school text book, as “white supremacy.”  The author, seemingly reluctantly, admitted that though the easiest option – the extermination of lesser breeds – would not be allowed by humanity, “we … have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”

      Now all this eugenic stuff lost most of its gleam after the fall of Nazi Germany, when were revealed the horrors of extermination, sadistic experiments on “imbeciles” and on those of “lower races” (like Jews and Poles) and forced sterilization and abortion.  But by the 1950s an alternative appeared that enabled eugenicists, Sanger still cheerleading, to pursue their same goal with different tactics.  The alternative?  Contraception, the illegality of which was ditched, not by popular will, but by, again, judicial fiat – contraception, a new weapon to be aimed at undesirables, who would be encouraged in its use.  And so Pandora’s Box was opened… very wide.  Later, when Pope Paul VI reiterated in 1968 the Catholic Church’s unchanging position on this issue – to the sound of many Catholics protesting publicly – His Holiness prophesied in Humanae Vitae that the acceptance of the use of artificial birth control would lead to promiscuity, illegitimacy, and divorce. He got it right on every point, an accuracy of prophecy evident all around us.  And in the year 1973, the Supreme Court, by judicial fiat, declared a “constitutional right” what Paul VI predicted as a coming horror, the way paved by contraception, the horror of abortion. 

      It may seem strange to keep relating all these “developments” back to Darwinism, but the defenses mounted in favor of eugenics (many of them self-evidently hair-brained), of contraception and abortion (as well as of vicious business practices and the manipulative power of advertising and entertainment) have a familiar ring to them:  they all presume an image of the human being that is not of God but only, only of matter, the product, as one prominent Darwinian, Steven Schafersman, describes it, of the “process of evolution [that] is blind, mechanistic, purposeless, goalless, unplanned, and completely natural and material….  [T]he universe and life is [sic] devoid of immanent meaning and purpose.”  What a world to “live” in!

      Charles Darwin himself might have been a little surprised by all these deductions from his theory of the origin of the species.  He himself most likely was an atheist and a materialist.  His private correspondence certainly points in that direction.  For Darwin, his theory of evolution supposedly allowed for no belief in a Creator God; many today are atheists by way of the theory, a position that, of course, cannot be scientifically held, but rather only by means of some rather risky philosophical assertions.  Whatever the case, “Neo-Darwinism” is hegemonic in the realm of biology today, its adherents brooking no public dissent from the party line.  Many, in the face of all this “confidence,” presume that Darwinism is completely indisputable.  That’s because they are not reading journals of science on this subject, where there are appearing more frequently dissenters in the corridors of science.  It’s becoming a scene of more and more conflict and disagreement.  And the reaction is fierce, bullying, replete with ad hominem, and it’s getting a bit hysterical. 

      Whatever the full future of Darwinism – a theory that offers much in the way of understanding “evolution,” but which is also showing more and more lacunae – why, though, the fierce defense of it as if, as a number of scientists are beginning to point out, it is a sacred dogma?  Why not further critical testing of it?  Why this absolute certainty of the theory, a certainty that is so unscientific, kind of like all the assuredness surrounding Newtonian physics… until Einstein came along? 

      Well, there are egos, turf, tenure, pride, etc. to protect, I guess.  But there’s another tell-tale sign of what’s going on in many quarters of the defensiveness of Darwinians:  they tend to scream about religion invading science anytime the phrase “intelligent design” crops up or even when a recognized scientist, who may not even be a religious believer, questions Darwinism.  Is the holding of this theory, at all costs, a kind of bulwark against the idea of a God?  Is there, that is, a rather unscientific motive – disbelief in God – behind all these attempts – and there are many – to squelch dissent? 

      For some, a meaningless, purposeless world with no intelligence behind it, is a world of “freedom”… to practice the latest variation of a theory of eugenics, to push for more and more human control (that is, the management of experts) over all of human life to the extent of subjecting even the most intimate aspects of life of man and woman to artificial control, and even the power to “grant” and take innocent human life.  The acceptance of abortion is just the dread end of a long line of dehumanization that is inseparable from a loss of belief in God.  And Darwinism has become the ill-used means of keeping this God at bay… so that we can continue on with our genetic manipulations, test-tubes of human embryos, and preventing the conception of “undesirables” (or their destruction if undesirability is discovered after conception).  After all, there is no One to be accountable to, and without God, we can define the human being as we want, as the latest experiment demands or for implementation of the latest scientific plan for “improvement.”  We have turned our technology on ourselves. 

      When I read back over the eugenicists’ descriptions of those they had targeted for elimination and then listen to the present-day defenses of abortion, I hear, eerily, more or less the same lingo, the same litany of demeaning references now applied to the unborn child:  “unwanted,” “a mass of tissues” (all there is, really, is matter, no soul), “a growth,” “a viral alien,” and, the favorite of many a eugenic expert, “a parasite.”  Without God, and the truth that we are made in His image, the human being dehumanizes himself.  And as Dostoyevsky, the Russian novelist, put into the mouth of his half-mad, but perceptive character Ivan Karamazov, “Everything is permissible, if there is no God,” even the slaughter of innocent children.