Sunday, March 09, 2008

Sunday Fire and Brimstone

Messy subjects are something we avoid when possible, so I apologize if this sends you crawling back under the covers. The other day a caller to CSpan said something that has stuck in my craw ever since, about a Prescott/Bush ancestor being involved in a movement to rid the earth of those underclasses that were such an impediment to progress for the 'rest of us'. Of course, the caller was relating present policies of this awful occupied White House of economic disfavor toward the deprived.

I can't say I haven't verged on accusations of this degree, but it's so mindboggling, I don't think I can commit to that opinion myself. I don't think the cretin in chief actually has the mental capacity for the kind of planning involved in slanting economic policy to eliminate the poor altogether. The powers behind his do-it-yourself throne may be more inclined and more able to put together that sort of schematic plan, however.

While the results of the present policies of our rightwingers have the result of making life precarious for those who they take advantage of, I don't accuse every member of the weakminded followers of having actual physical annihilation of their opponents in their minds.

This was something we talked around this a.m. in comments at Eschaton, and Avedon kindly sent me a reference when I inquired about one that a commenter had put up, that wasn't giving real information. I am going to excerpt a few interesting, or, more to the point, revolting, pieces from a review of the eugenics movement that Edwin Black reported on in his recent book, War Against the Weak, reviewed by Daniel Kevles.

Black pursues his thesis across largely familiar ground -- the eugenic theories that attributed costly physical conditions and socially deleterious behaviors to genetics, accounting for many of them as expressions of ''feeble-mindedness''; the claims in the United States that such deficiencies occurred with particularly high frequency among African-Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe; the respectable standing of eugenic science at leading universities, state agencies and institutions, public interest organizations and research installations, notably the Eugenics Record Office, which was part of what became the department of genetics at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and which was financed in the main by the widow of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman and in part by grants from the Rockefeller philanthropies. Black rightly observes that eugenic research into heredity combined ''equal portions of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine science.''
(snip)
If he covers what is in the main a well-known story, he adds to it substantial new detail, much of it chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States. Some American eugenicists argued for killing the ''unfit,'' and a few indeed practiced it by subjecting newborns to euthanasia (not a merciful death for those in pain, Black points out, but a painless death for those ''deemed unworthy of life'').
(snip)
Eugenics was an insidious doctrine, unabashed in its aim of deploying up-to-date science to solve social problems, even if that meant writing the ostensible dregs of society out of the American social compact. It nevertheless attracted many adherents among the white middle class, not only conservatives but also a number of disparate progressives, including, for example, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and Rabbi Stephen Wise. Despite its imperfections, Black's book does prompt us to wonder what in medical genetics and biotechnology we are taking socially and morally for granted today that our descendants might indict us for tomorrow.


While the segue to 'mercy me, in light of such atrocities, we must look at what we MAY do that would approach this vicious mistake" avoids making a correlation with present day policies, I think we see more than a reflection of eugenics in today's libertarian theses. What effect besides eliminating do we envision if we knowingly condemn children to poverty and lack of health care.

When we eliminate the prospect of good wages for a large portion of the American public, they have no resort but to leave or do battle in whatever way they can with the forces against them. In our years of the War On Poverty, our society consulted its better instincts and offered opportunity to the less fortunate. In the present War For Poverty, the worst element in our society routs out the goodness and replaces it with law of the jungle.

It is past time to reclaim the high ground.

317 days.

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7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

But...but...but...

If we get rid of all the 'poor', who'll take out the trash?

I think they've long since revised their eugenics plans to accept the fact that they have to live with the dirty poor. Their efforts have been focussed on returning them to slavery, or even worse. And they have worked like a charm.

--Daddy-O

Avedon sent me.

9:50 AM  
Blogger Ruth said...

Disagree, Daddy-O, we have citizens needing schools and essential services, we can't afford them. Your sanitation, cleaning and construction crews are for the largest part non-citizens. Who do you think the wealthiest want to eliminate? do you see a big move to deport illegals among the business owners?

9:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello, Ruth. Avedon sent me, too.

What you said about the "law of the jungle" echoed something I've been pondering for a while, though I think of it as the "dog eat dog" frame of our so-called free market capitalism. (I'm still working this out, so what follows may be only partly coherent.)

It occurred to me that the dog-eat-dog frame is false because it really only benefits those dogs that are willing to eat other dogs, which most dogs (i.e., people in the marketplace) are not. So the frame we are encouraged to believe is (a) natural, (b) desirable, and (c) immutable, is in fact only "good" for the greedy, the sociopathic, the authoritarian, and the morally challenged.

Recent studies using fMRIs showing that the impulse to altruism is as hard-wired as the need for food and sex, as well as studies that show that groups with more altruism are more survivable than groups with less, suggests that most ordinary human beings (what we might call "normal" human beings, or perhaps simply "human beings"), neither want, need, nor would do well in the dog-eat-dog world we're supposed to buy into.

I also recall reading years ago that one school of anthropological thought felt that the quality that separated us from other animals, and that was most responsible for our success as a species, was not the usual walking erect/binocular vision/opposable thumb/bigger brain/capacity for language cluster that we used to believe, but instead our ability to cooperate.

(That's maybe not so unique to humans as we thought, though: when we find evidence that T-Rex hunted in packs, with the adolescents and kids driving game towards the grown-ups, maybe cooperation is a strategy used by many, many successful species, not just us.)

Today I read that just six transnational corporations control 70% of the world's supply of wheat, 800 million people world-wide go hungry, and one billion people are overweight, all thanks to this so-called global free market, and that's just one example among many. It seems to me that the only species that can actually survive in this kind of world is homo oligopolus, not homo sapiens.

That's as far as my thoughts have taken me at this point, so I'll just end by saying thanks for this blog, and I'll be back.

Cheers

12:33 PM  
Blogger CupOJoe said...

Avedon may have sent me, but bringing the pizza and cheese dip was my own idea.

What I'm most afraid of is that technology will get to the point where most manufacturing jobs can be fully automated and there will no longer be any use for people like us. Like me. And then we'll be killed.

As I have said numerous times before (but which I will repeat because hardly anyone reads my site), the mindset of the elite can be summed up in three simple phrases:

1) They are the only people in the world (the only ones that matter, anyway),

2) The only thing that's real is money,

3) The world ends when they die.

If a Puritan is someone who lies awake at night worried that someone is having fun, then these are people who lie awake at night worried that there's some money out there that they haven't been able to get their hands on.

I don't think they will succeed. I think one of two things will happen: there will be a massive uprising in this country that's finally sick of all of this and they'll throw the bums out (hopefully into a nice clean prison cell), or the country will get worse and the rest of the world will take matters into their hands and put a stop to it. I think the latter is more likely, but the former is still a possibility.

One thing I'm sure of is that whatever happens, it won't be soon, and things are going to get a LOT worse before they get better.

-Joe

3:55 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

too bad Americans are so poorly educated. if they weren't they would recognize this so-called "conservative" movement that has had the country in a stranglehold since Ronnie Raygun for exactly what it is:

a return to the antebellum south.

ole dixie HAS ris again and the coming economic crash will turn this world into Plantation Planet.

8:31 AM  
Blogger Peter Patau said...

Excellent post about what the dog-eat-dog string-pullers behind the scenes have been trying to accomplish. The only saving grace is that their form of extreme laissez faire capitalism tends to destroy itself, over and over -- and seems to be doing it again. If Krugman is right in his column today, we're facing a financial collapse of a scale similar to the 1930s. Even the rich are no longer investing in anything, because they feel they can't trust any investment. When that happens, collapse ensues.

A terrible prospect, but probably the only way things will get better. In the wake of the 1929 collapse, this nation rebuilt its tattered social bonds and created a new, more caring social contract that lasted for a good 50 years. (That's also when eugenics started falling into disfavor, though there were holdouts, of course.)

We're not going to take it anymore. The Reagan-Bush war against the poor is just about over. Too bad it will probably take a disaster to finally end it, but that's what happens when people forget the lessons of history -- or are lulled by the media into forgetting the truths their grandparents learned through hard experience -- and have to learn them all over again.

10:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Your outrage regarding the impending demise of the poor is commendable, but it lacks historical perspective.

Aside from the fact that the poor always have been abused, brutalized and murdered, the program to which you refer does have some uniquely horrific precedents.

Have you forgotten (or never known about) the infamous and brutal Nazi program of "eugenic cleansing"? Thousands of retarded and otherwise dysfunctional children and adults, deemed "unfit" by Hitler's racial purists,were institutionally murdered, usually by injections of air embolisms,to rid the Reich of the burden of caring for or rehabilitating them.

The program was made palatable to the German people through pseudo-scientific propaganda films that explained the purported economic and racial benefits to German society.

That demonic horror of "Us vs. them" always lurks in our collective psyches - sometimes piously hidden below the surface, and at other times very much on the surface (read: Bosnia, Darfur, etc.)

As a species we seem to have a profound dislike for each other, and over many years (I am a discouraged old curmudgeon)I have concluded that one reason for the endless and pervasive killing is because at some deep level we relish war as a sanctioned opportunity to get rid of (shudder)"THEM", by which the speaker usually means "everybody else." After which, of course, the survivors can fight among themselves.

Nobody really wants the wretched refuse of any teeming shore. Global warming, and rising sea levels, will demonstrate that on a scale probably unprecedented in horror. After all, of what economic value is an illiterate native of some barely-above-sea-level Pacific island? As the Bushies taught us, of what economic, or human, value is a displaced resident of New Orleans?

When the Turks slaughtered the Armenians, and the world watched and did nothing, Hitler learned a lesson about the ineffectiveness of moral outrage. It appears that the Bushies have learned the same lesson: Say righteous words, pass a pointless resolution, and move on.

Sadly, it appears that our profound indifference to the planetary ecology will have self-cleansing effect. And unstoppable natural forces will accomplish what righteous indignation, self-restraint and good conscience could not: The entrenched forces of unchecked greed will be swept away.... unfortunately, along with the rest of us.

BobR

2:34 PM  

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