Like infectious diseases, the deviations, abnormalities, and excesses of the fear instinct are acquired by the individual in the course of his relations with the external environment, and are as real and substantial as are syphilis, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, and the bubonic plague. To regard them as imaginary or to relegate them to the action of Providence or to heredity is theoretically a misconception, and practically a great danger to humanity.
There is nowadays a veritable craze for heredity and eugenics. Biology is misconceived, misinterpreted, and misapplied to social problems, and to individual needs and ailments. Everything is ascribed to heredity, from folly and crime to scratches and sneezes. The goddess Heredity is invoked at each flea-bite—in morsu pulicis Deum invocare.
Even war is supposed to be due to the omnipotent deity of Heredity. Superior races by their patriotism and loyalty destroy the weak and the helpless, and relentlessly exterminate all peaceful tribes. Such warlike stock comes of superior clay. The dominant races have some miraculous germ-plasm, special “unit characters,” wonderful dominant “units” which, like a precious heritage, these races transmit unsullied and untarnished to their descendants.
Wars, carnage, butcheries make for progress, culture, and evolution. Our boasted civilization with its “scientific” business thoroughness and its ideal of “efficiency” attempts to carry into effect this quasi-evolutionary doctrine—this apotheosis of brute force under the aegis of science. The eugenic belief is really a recrudescence of the ancient savage superstition of the magic virtues of noble blood and of divine king stock.
All nervous, mental, neuropathic, and psychopathic maladies are supposed to be a matter of heredity. If people are poor, ignorant, superstitious, stupid, degraded, brutal, and sick, the eugenists unhesitatingly put it all down to poor stock.
The eugenic remedy is as simple as it is believed to be efficacious: Introduce by legislation “efficient” laws favoring “eugenic” marriage, and teach the masses control of births. The select and chosen stock alone should multiply—the millennium is then bound to come. Such is the doctrine of our medico-biological sages.
“Scientific” farmers and breeders of vegetables, fruits, and cattle are regarded as competent judges of human “breeders.” Agriculturists and horticulturists set themselves up as advisers in “the business of raising good crops of efficient children.” Bachelors, spinsters, and the childless generally, are specially versed in eugenic wisdom and pedagogics.
All social ills and individual complaints are referred to one main source—heredity. With the introduction of eugenic legislation, with the sterilization of the socially unfit, among whom the greatest men and women may be included, with the breeding of good “orthodox, common stock,” and with eugenic Malthusian control of births, all evil and diseases on earth will cease, while the Philistine “superman” will reign supreme forevermore.
In the Middle Ages all diseases and epidemics, all wars, all social and private misfortunes were considered as visitations of Divine wrath. The fear instinct held sway, terrorizing poor, deluded humanity. In modern times our would-be eugenic science refers all ills of the flesh and woes of the mind to an outraged Heredity. The dark ages had resort to prayers, fasts, and penitence, while our age childishly pins its faith to the miraculous virtues and rejuvenating, regenerative powers of legislative eugenic measures, and to the eugenic Malthusian control of births.