Eugenics

is a mild change of pace. Chesterton was battling (intellectually) with eugenicists in the early Twentieth Century. The discoveries in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War drove the movement into social disrepute. They're back and they're getting more and more plain about their ambitions for the "new and improved" human race.

WILL Darwinists get back into the eugenics business?: "So ... now, James Watson, who has declared that (Darwinian) evolution is both a law and a fact, has since proclaimed,

... black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that 'equal powers of reason' were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

And this hard on the heels of Richard Dawkins* spilling on about the 'fantastic success' of the 'Jewish lobby.'

Some people wonder what is happening. Bill was wondering whether Darwinists would get back into the eugenics business big time. Having watched H.L. Mencken-style Social Darwinism morph into sociobiology and then get rebranded as evolutionary psychology, I have some idea what's driving the trend: power

Once people gain the right to simply ban opposing ideas, they can afford to be more up front about what they really think.

By the way, in case anyone wonders about whether evolutionary psychology is simply rebranded sociobiology, well, Dawkins apparently said that himself, as I noted in By Design or by Chance?.

What we sometimes miss is the underlying reason why Darwinists behave this way. If you believe that human beings have minds that are made in the image of - or are a local image of - a divine mind or cosmic law, then the reason why racism is wrong is obvious: Race relates to externals, not eternals. Yes, some people will believe that and still be racists. But here's the difference: to the extent that theists are racists, they are wrong. I don't mean politically incorrect or contrary to the pieties of liberalism. I mean wrong about the very nature of our universe.

They are wrong even though some qualities are distributed unevenly across ethnic groups. Body type, for example, plays a key role in determining the competitive sports in which one might excel professionally, and we get our body type mostly from our forebears. But none of that speaks to the value of a human being, only to how he might best use his time.

But what if you are, as most committed Darwinists are, a materialist? Then a human being is simply a meat puppet. At that point, distinctions that would be discounted in the light of eternity actually determine a person's value. Or else he has no value, in which case ...

Of course, decent people won't just accept that. No, instead, they pass dozens or thousands of political correctness rules against taking the inevitable consequences of Darwinism and materialism seriously. And they flirt with thwarting their self-imposed rules. Or else they concoct grand, improbable schemes like this one and this one, to dispense with nature altogether. But that is all they can do, and in the long run, it leads to absurdities.

Legitimized racism is an inevitable consequence of materialism, and I expect the Darwinists know that as well as anyone else. I suppose at this point their social policy arm (liberalism, in its current form) had better start drafting a whole bunch more daft political correctness rules. It's either that or eugenics.

*Note: I think what upset people about Dawkins's comments is the assumption that there is something unusual about a successful Jewish lobby in Washington. There had better be a successful Jewish lobby in Washington, let me tell you. Any interest group that doesn't have a successful lobby in Washington is a non-starter. Canadians have one of the best lobbies in Washington. Why not bash us then, and give the Jews a rest? Because, for whatever reason, many people don't hate us and they do hate Jews, whom they commonly do not even bother to distinguish from the Israelis."

(Via Post-Darwinist.)