Читать книгу Nazi Eugenics - Melvyn Conroy - Страница 9

If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating crétins. – Francis Galton (1865)1

In today's society applied eugenics is not a utopia anymore, and it will be even less so in the society of the future.

– Jenő Vámos (1911)2

Charles Darwin published his On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, creating a controversy from which Judeo-Christian theology in particular has since never recovered.3 For all of its unintended subsequently malign influence, the book contained no racial theories. The suggestion that he would have endorsed such ideas would have horrified Darwin, who was a notably tolerant person. In fact, except by implication, the work contained little reference to Homo sapiens, essentially being concerned with the evolution of other animal life and that of plants.4

Long before Darwin shook the foundations of religious belief, there had been much supposedly scientific debate concerning the development of human characteristics. In the 1820's what became known as recapitulationist theory emerged. This posited that childhood in the white race was the equivalent of savagery or primitivism in evolutionary terms. Thus adults of "inferior" groups were deemed to be at the mental and emotional level of white male children or adolescents. Nor was this pseudo-science to be applied solely to non-white races. The "inferior" groups could (and did) consist of the anti-social, criminals, women, and any other disliked nationality the defining group chose to include. Although overtaken by Darwinism, the influence of such thinking on later eugenic theorists will become apparent.5

Two years before Darwin's Origins of Species appeared, in 1857 the French psychiatrist, Benedict Augustin Morel, had published his hugely influential work Traite des degenerescence physique, et intellectuelles et morales de l'espece humaine (Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneracy of Mankind), in which he proposed a theory of "degeneration." Morel suggested that many illnesses, whether physical, intellectual, or moral, were all caused by a single process: degeneration. He concluded that most illnesses are the result of an incurable hereditary disorder. Allowing those suffering from such disabilities to reproduce presented a genetic risk to the nation. The causes of such a condition were, in Morel's view, the over-consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and opium. Morel believed that those damaged by overindulgence in these and other appetites developed illnesses which weakened their heredity value. This weakened state was passed on to future stock, for the effects were cumulative, so that after approximately four generations the degenerate line would end because the children of the ultimate generation would be born sterile imbeciles.

Degeneracy was a 'one size fits all' theory that neatly explained a wide variety of diseases. If the symptoms of those diseases were ostensibly different, to Morel they were simply alternative expressions of a single underlying disorder: degenerate heredity. The importance of Morel's theory on the development of eugenic thinking cannot be over emphasized, for as Morel wrote: "We are not dealing with the individual, the single human being, but with society as a whole and the means to such important an end have to be measured accordingly".In this sentence can be seen the rationale for all that was to follow.