For Those Determined to Miss the Point

Richard Dawkins put his foot in it again last month.  (Yes, I'm lagging behind.)  This time it was a sort of defense of eugenics on Twitter:

Followed by:

One of the things I've noticed about Dawkins is the way he expresses himself with extreme clumsiness, and then, when challenged, goes on the defensive with equal clumsiness, bluster, and irrelevance.  I find this bemusing because I've learned to expect fluency and at least superficial clarity from British writers.  For someone so controversial, Dawkins doesn't seem comfortable with controversy; he takes disagreement personally, and rather than engage it, he denounces it ex cathedra.

I think I came in at the middle of this thread, but I can't find what came before that first tweet and it's not worthwhile to dig further.  So let me begin by asking, just by the way: Has anyone said that eugenics "wouldn't work"?  In the absence of an example to discuss, I'll examine what it would mean for eugenics to work.

On the most basic, neutral technical level, I can't see that eugenics would work.  In The Pure Society (Verso, 2000), the historian of science Andre Pichot quotes a 1930 book by the French biologist Jean Rostand:

All kinds of objections, both practical and theoretical, were raised against the application of eugenic ideas.  In particular against the sterilization of severely defective individuals, in which connection the discouraging slowness of the possible effects was adduced.  Fischer calculated that it would take twenty-two generations to reduce the proportion of mentally ill from 1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000, and ninety generations to reduce it to 1 in 10,000.  The more serious objections, however, were of a moral order; to many consciences, any restriction on the right to procreate was seen as an injury to individual liberty and the dignity of the human person [Pichot, 135].

"The Fischer referred to here is probably Eugen Fischer, a German anthropologist and geneticist, and the author, along with Baur and Lenz, of what at the time was the bible of human genetics...; Fisher was a eugenicist, and compromised by Nazism" (ibid.).

I don't know if Fischer's calculations would stand up today, but it's telling that even a proponent of eugenics acknowledged that it would take about five hundred years to reduce a (supposed) trait by a factor of ten, and a couple of millennia to reduce it by another factor of ten.  This doesn't mean the enterprise is impossible in principle (which I take to be what Dawkins means), but it's definitely impossible as a practical matter.  And that's only one detail, one flaw of many in the genome, that would have to be managed to improve the race.  Perhaps Fischer believed that a Thousand Year Rule would endure long enough to carry out the project, but I doubt Dawkins does, or that he's even thought of the problem.

Then too, mental illness is not a genetically determined trait, though scientists are still trying to claim that it is. (On some level, many are still eugenicists, keeping the faith in their well-funded catacombs against the day when Political Correctness is destroyed and they can carry the faith of their fathers back out into the light.)  Sterilizing the mentally ill (touted as a humane alternative to simply killing them) would not eliminate mental illness.  Nor could a eugenic program affect most of the qualities eugenicists hope to eliminate or augment, since they are not genetically determined.

Presumably in order to ward off moral objections, Dawkins offers the neutral example of breeding "humans to run faster or jump higher."  Even those are dubious, since we have no idea how to breed for such skills, which are a combination of physical endowment and decades of training for each individual.  I've been reading Dick Francis's mystery novels, which are set in the world of high-end horse racing, and a point that crops up repeatedly is that breeding horses to run faster and jump higher is still a crap shoot, with no guarantee that the offspring of elite sires and dams will be a champion.  Training is a factor, as is the ability of the jockey, but also dumb luck in the roll of the genetic dice.  Yet the reproduction of racehorses is under human control in a way that human reproduction isn't.  The most that could be hoped for (if that's the word) is to produce a strain of human beings who might be able to run faster and jump higher in competition with each other, while most of us remained unaffected.  That's a far cry from improving human beings as a species, and as with the fantasy of sending a few colonists to the stars while most people are stuck on a dying earth, it's fair to doubt that eugenicists have ever had any interest in human beings as a species.

When you bring in the breeding of other animals or plants by human beings for human ends, more practical problems appear.  I've already suggested one; human generations are a lot longer than those of the other species.  A racehorse, I gather from Dick Francis, can start competing by the age of two.  Homo sapiens can't breed for at least fifteen years, and preferably longer: the convention for human generations is around a quarter of a century.  That's why Fischer's eugenic program would take so long to have any detectable effect.  Eugenic fantasies of the twentieth century didn't consider this.  The Noble Engineer Robert Heinlein, in his stories about the long-lived Lazarus Long, imagined a privately-funded foundation that encouraged individuals from long-lived lineages to marry individuals from long-lived lineages.  This foundation took the "long view," Heinlein postulated, but it produced significant results in only a couple of generations: people who lived long enough to be noticed and persecuted by their short-lived neighbors.  Heinlein, it should be recalled, is regarded as a practitioner of "hard science-fiction," the coldly realistic, science-based SF that doesn't indulge in airy-fairy wishful thinking and fantasy.

An additional disadvantage of those who would breed humans is that they can't just cull the failures, as selective animal or plant breeders can do.  Even sterilizing them is in bad odor nowadays, thanks to Hitler.  And that brings up another point where Dawkins fumbles: it's not possible to object to eugenics in purely practical terms on one hand or moral/political terms on the other.  There's not a clear boundary between the moral and the practical in any domain that affects human beings.  Advocates of eugenics, then and now, argue in moral terms: don't you want to decrease human suffering, eliminate preventable diseases, and move us ahead to the next evolutionary stage?  If it's pointed out that eugenics will do no such thing, they appeal to the wonders of Science and accuse their critics of anti-intellectual bias, and superstitious hatred of evidence and reason. As Dawkins did here.  I don't accuse him of being a crypto-eugenicist, because I have no idea what lurks in his heart.  I don't think he does, but he argues in such bad faith, he's so intellectually and morally dishonest, that I see no reason to take his protestations seriously.

Finally, just as a purely scientific issue, no one knows what a superior human being would be.  Jumping higher and running faster do not a Homo superior make.  Getting rid of debilitating genetic illnesses would be an improvement, but it wouldn't be a new species.  (Remember too that advocates of genetic manipulation claim that they can do the same job without the traditional eugenic methods, though their claims must be regarded critically too.  Scientists love to promise wonderful outcomes they are nowhere near able to deliver.)  Dawkins is confusing or equivocating between selective breeding, a local intervention, and eugenics, a global one.  Eugenicists appealed to the analogy of breeding animals and plants, but they had a much more ambitious project in mind: that of replacing Homo sapiens with Homo sapiens 2.0.  The racism in their propaganda wavered between the implicit and the explicit, as it does today.

One difference between selective breeding and eugenics is that the former involves the control and manipulation of other species by human beings for human ends.  Breeding doesn't really have the good of its subjects in mind.  Are cows made happier, or even objectively better in evolutionary terms, by being bred to produce more milk for human consumption?  I think it's safe to doubt that.  (Self-styled Darwinians love to accuse people who, e.g., wear spectacles of interfering with Evolution; I can't recall them ever complaining that selective animal breeding does, though it certainly does so.)  When scientists use this analogy, it's reasonable to ask who's breeding whom, to what end, and for whose benefit?  I think they tend to imagine themselves as specimens of Homo superior, selflessly guiding human cattle into the glorious future.  This was also at least a subtext of mid-20th century eugenicist science fiction; aside from Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, see his 1949 novelette "Gulf" in the collection Assignment in Eternity, where the scientific racism is explicit in the text, and its 1982 sequel Friday.  Again, I'm not accusing Richard Dawkins of such an attitude, though his use of the selective-breeding analogy relies on it; I just think that he hasn't thought about it, which doesn't speak well for him either.

This careless equivocation is typical of Dawkins.  It goes back to the beginning of his career as a popular-science writer.  In The Selfish Gene (1976), he flipped between insisting that he called genes "selfish" and "ruthless" as terms of art, 'not even mean[ing] the words in a metaphorical sense," without ever suggesting that organisms are selfish; and casually saying that "This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour" (TSG, 2) and "we are born selfish" (ibid.).  When critics accuse Dawkins of saying that selfish genes produce selfish organisms, he and his defenders point to his disclaimers while ignoring the passages which undermine the disclaimers.  It's like reading Christian theology: even in a rather short book, you can find contradictory doctrines which can be used as prooftexts for whatever position you like.  I said above that I'm used to British writers expressing themselves clearly, and maybe Dawkins isn't an exception: he dumps his mistakes and contradictions openly on the page, so blatantly that only the mind of faith can miss them.  Dawkins should be dismissed as thoroughly as he dismisses theologians, and for the same reasons.

Remember Why the Good Lord Gave You Eyes -- Medicalize!

The latest (so far) American mass shooting has produced the usual confused back-and-forth -- no, make that a free-for-all -- about What Must Be Done.  After President Trump declared in Tokyo that mass shootings are a "mental health problem at the highest level", many people were outraged.  (One intelligent response to Trump's statement that "We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries" was that it was true, but mental illness doesn't produce frequent mass killings in other countries.)  Glenn Greenwald tweeted angrily, "When Muslims use violence, they're evil 'animals.' When white people do it, it's a 'sad' problem of 'mental health'".

I'm afraid I couldn't resist replying mischievously, "Well, we wouldn't want to criminalize a medical problem, would we?" That was because I remembered (though I can't now find, and I've been looking) an earlier tweet in which, addressing the failure of the US War on Drugs, Greenwald said that it's a bad idea to criminalize a medical problem like drug addiction.  Even if I misremembered and he didn't tweet to that effect, the line is a commonplace in discussion of drug problems in the US today.  The trouble is that drug addiction isn't a medical problem.

That doesn't mean that I think drug use should be criminalized.  Putting the situation in those terms -- criminalization vs. medicalization -- sets up a binary that is at best debatable, as though there were only two options, jail and a doctor's care.  The main reason I say that addiction isn't a medical problem is that "treatment" doesn't work, and most of the reasoning behind medicalizing drug use is flawed at best.  In the US and in other countries under our influence, treatment is often part of the criminalization of drug use, with users and addicts ordered to get treatment, as an alternative or supplement to jail. It should be obvious that forced "treatment" for behavior is not likely to be very successful, and ethical practitioners shouldn't go along with it - but they do, which casts serious doubt on the ethics of those practitioners.  So we get the worst of both models, the criminal and the medical.

For the same reasons, I find myself skeptical about the legalistic approach to gun violence, which is a very serious problem in the US.  Why not medicalize the problem?  For one thing, it wouldn't work either; for another, as Greenwald indicated, treatment would be applied in a biased manner, since there are no objective measures for distinguishing between criminal gun violence and gun violence commited as a result of mental illness.  I noticed after the Sandy Hook massacre that there was a lot of confusion about this: it was liberals no less than rightwingers whom I saw trying to tie access to guns to mental health.  Even people I knew who'd previously denounced the stigmatizing of mental illness leaped to do just that after Sandy Hook.  Some argued that the behavior of the shooter, Adam Lanzer, before the massacre showed that he was "deranged"; others pointed out that he planned the killing methodically well in advance, which is not what one would expect from a psychotic.  Various mental health advocates pointed out that most mentally ill individuals, even the severely ill, are not dangerous to others.  It doesn't appear that we have good, objective psychiatric criteria for spotting dangerous people in advance.

I also find myself ambivalent about the explosion of activism by high-school students demanding action by their government.  I'm glad to see them speaking out, and I can't think of a better cause.  It's fun, and very gratifying, to watch them stand up to conservative politicians and pundits who want them to shut up, since so many of their elders believe that you're supposed to crumble and collapse when you meet opposition and criticism, especially from the Right.  They're bright, articulate, and inspiring.  I'm only uneasy because I don't believe they know, any more than anyone else, how to fix the problem.  But I don't think they know any less than their NRA-loving critics.

I began drafting this post last November, as readers may guess from the reference to Trump's Asia tour in the first paragraph.  It's horrifying and depressing to find that it's still timely.

There Are People Who Do Not Love Their Fellow Man

I don't know much about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. I probably wouldn't even if I watched TV, since reality programs about religious nuts are not my cup of tea. What little I do know comes primarily from voyeuristic liberals who throw tantrums about them but at the same time can't or won't avert their eyes.

This sort of thing always reminds me of something that happened in the 1960s, when I was in my late teens. My brothers and I were riding with my mother to go shopping in town, and we passed a couple of long-haired, possibly bearded young men hitchhiking. My mother's head spun around as she gawked at them; it's a miracle we didn't go off the road. This was rural northern Indiana, and the hippie look wouldn't be taken over by country music fans for another decade or more, so actual hippies were in short supply. "I thought you said those people were just doing it to get attention," I remarked with typical teenage acidity. "Well," my mother replied with a high-pitched giggle I hadn't heard from her before, "I'm giving it to them!" Her prescription for us, of course, when dealing with those who are just doing things to get attention, was to withhold it. But quod licet Mommy non licet loinfruit.

I think it was my Facebook Tabloid Friend who first linked to a story about the Duggars, when they announced her latest pregnancy. I believe he linked to this story, a bit of concern trolling about the health risks of too many pregnancies. Tabloid Friend has thousands of friends on Facebook, most of whom appear to be Obama loyalists and nominal liberals like himself, people who scorn religious fundamentalists who forget that Jesus taught Love, you bigoted assholes! LOVE!!! So, of course, being true followers of the gentle Nazarene, they reacted to the Duggars with disgust. Loving disgust, of course, in the true spirit of Christ. Like my RWA1 on Facebook, TF saves me a lot of time in finding this kind of material.

Then after Michelle had a miscarriage, Tabloid Friend let us know that the Duggars had taken a picture of the little mite and distributed it publicly! to the whole freakin' world! ... Well, actually, they distributed it at the memorial service they held for her. According to Mary Elizabeth Williams's post on the story at Salon, one of the Duggars' young cousins tweeted the picture, and it eventually went up on the Duggars' website. Now, we all know I'm weird, but I don't see this as a big deal. The picture wasn't a gory, pro-lifer dead fetus; it was a cleaned-up tiny hand resting on (I presume) Michelle's finger. Not nearly as morbid as a Victorian dead-baby picture. Not as morbid as Eric Clapton's memorial song for his four-year-old son. But goodness, the fury this inspired! Christlike love-like fury of course. (I'm not being entirely sarcastic there: judging from the gospels, Jesus was given to exactly such outbursts himself.)

After the first flush of vitriol subsided -- Williams writes that "Commenters right here on Salon called them 'an obscenity' who are “unfairly crowding the planet with [their] disgusting obsession' and 'selfish, polluting choices,' who were, in essence, 'asking for it'" -- the main accusation was that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves with that picture. They were so worked up that they ignored matters that Williams had covered in her post, like who took the picture, and that it was spread first by a young cousin on Twitter. (We all know how aware teenagers are of privacy issues in social media.) They claimed that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves, exploiting their children just to make a buck for their reality TV show. Which has some justice, since the Duggars are indeed the subject of a reality TV show, but that means everything they do is connected to it. If the fetus had survived to term, the show would have exploited her baby cuteness. So anyone who wants to level this accusation has to ask whether a given act is good or bad in itself, and as I said, I don't see anything wrong with taking and distributing this picture.

I suspect a couple of other factors. The (slightly) less sinister one is just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the human body-- except that we right-thinking liberals are supposed to be healthy, life-affirming, pro-sex and pro-pleasure; hostility to the flesh is supposed to be the domain of Them, the Bible-thumpers. It's not that simple, though. One of the first things I noticed about Tabloid Liberal and his Obama-loving community of commenters was how much time and energy they spent rubbernecking and clucking over sex scandals, like Anthony Weiner's photos. Again, the party line is that only Republican Bible-thumpers care about what a politician does on his own time, but in reality it appears that liberals are at least as hysterical about it: at least as much as the Republicans who went after Bill Clinton in the Nineties, they demand that (especially male) politicians be monogamous and preferably married, a role model for our youth. (I remember that during Monicagate some Republicans wailed about how difficult it was to explain these horrible things to children, who would be traumatized for life because Our President had a dick; I think it was Katha Pollitt who pointed out that children were much more traumatized by the wars Clinton was waging, especially the terror bombing of Iraq, and by the alarmism over bad Muslims who were going to attack America if we didn't kill them first.) And good old Christopher Hitchens, who has just become late; I'll always remember his panicky revulsion over Clinton's "horrid leavings" on Lewinsky's blue dress. (And then there was his dismissal of the Dixie Chicks as "sluts" and "fucking fat slags" for mildly disrespecting George Bush.)

Another factor is squeamishness about death. Despite American secularists' self-righteousness about their rationality, their openness, their liberality, they exhibit very little of any of these. Death is scary, and I'm not putting people down for being upset by it. But "disgusting pictures of their dead baby"? The picture can be seen on Williams's post; I don't think it's disgusting -- if anything, a better criticism would be that it's too sanitized.

The other factor expresses itself in rhetoric reminiscent of the eugenics movement: the Duggars are breeding like rabbits, "pumping out so many babies on an already crowded planet", "the batshit Duggar woman, who spits out babies like a dog whelps pups - all for the greater glory of whatever sky fairy she and her semen-donor worship", "if everyone had the Duggar's thoughtless self-entitled attitude towards breeding the world would be a desolate, Mad Max style wasteland" -- but wait a minute, isn't it already a desolate wasteland?: "7 billion people on this earth and this lady thinks its cool to pop out 20. effing ridiculous", "This lady is a kid collector , she pops em out like rabbits", "This women is like a self fufilling prophecy pregnancy puppy mill." And there's a lot more like those out there. This is lynch-mob language, the sort of swill you hear from Israelis about the Arabs, that you used to hear about Jews from the Nazis, and from eugenicists about just about everybody.

Sure, you can argue against having such a large family, but that's just the point: these people aren't interested in arguments, they're just venting rage against people who haven't, as far as I can tell, actually harmed them in any way. They refuse to avert their gaze from this sight that inflames them so much. They're rubberneckers, ghouls, like people who gather around a fight or a traffic accident, hoping to see gore. If anyone's mental health is suspect in this little circus, it's not the Duggars'.

Two criticisms about the Duggars do seem possibly relevant to me. I've seen a couple of claims that the Duggars rely on public assistance, but evidence is slim so far. The best support I've seen is one commenter on this post, who answered another commenter's claim that taxpayers aren't contributing to the Duggars' income: "I admit that I do not watch this on a regular basis; however, when I did, the family (all of them) went grocery shopping and the mother used food stamps, a program that is tax-payer funded." (No permalinks to the individual comments, which are nested under this one.) This is only of real interest because the Duggars are apparently right-wing Christians who would be happy to get rid of public assistance for other less worthy people; if so, they're hypocrites and do have too many children: more than they can support despite being debt-free and employed.

The other important negative is that the Duggars belong to the Quiverfull Christian movement, which explicitly and overtly encourages the production of children, with women subordinated to men. (Interestingly, the movement also rejects medical treatment for infertility on the grounds that they are "a usurpation of God's providence".) Typically, Quiverfull focuses on a couple of "Old Testament" verses as the core of their doctrine, while apparently ignoring the New Testament's exaltation of celibacy and sexual abstinence. In this light, the Duggars' reality show can be seen as an attempt to make their cult look "normal" (to reverse right-wing attacks on gay-friendly television programming) by presenting a relatively attractive family as its emblem.

You could compare the Duggars, by the way, to the secular scientists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who had a dozen children in the early twentieth century in a somewhat more egalitarian marriage, immortalized in the book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Which reminds me of a reason, suggested by one online writer, why someone might enjoy watching the Duggars' show: it's interesting to see how people manage the logistics of a difficult task and bring it off successfully -- and raising a large family is a difficult task.

But there, you see? This fuss has tricked me into spending much more time than I intended online looking for information about the Duggars, who don't seem to me worth that much attention. In the case of Tabloid Friend and his community of commenters, the Duggars are much more interesting than, say, Obama's last-minute decision not to veto the indefinite-detention bill -- a matter on which, so far TF has had nothing to say. (You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, I guess.) But that's normal, isn't it? Scandalous sexual material is always handy for diverting the ignorant masses from issues that might actually affect their well-being. TF isn't that different from a Republican comparing homosexuality to bestiality -- he's just doing it from the other direction.