Applied Eugenics

by Paul Popenoe; Roswell H. Johnson

8. Awakening a national mind ready to undergo sacrifices on behalf of future generations.

In spite of some defects such a program brings out clearly the principle of eugenics,—the substitution of a selective birth-rate for the selective death-rate by which natural selection has brought the race to its present level. Nature lets a multitude of individuals be born and kills off the poorer ones; eugenics proposes to have fewer poor ones and more good ones born in each generation.

Any means which tends to bring about one of those ends, is a part of Applied Eugenics.

By this time the reader will have seen that eugenics has some definite ideals not only as to how the race can be kept from deteriorating further, under the interference with natural selection which civilization entails, but as to how its physical, mental and moral level can actually be raised. He can easily draw his own conclusions as to what eugenics does not propose. No eugenist worthy of the name has ever proposed to breed genius as the stockman breeds trotting horses, despite jibes of the comic press to the contrary. But if young people, before picking out their life partners, are thoroughly imbued with the idea that such qualities as energy, longevity, a sound constitution, public and private worth, are primarily due to heredity, and if they are taught to realize the fact that one marries not an individual but a family, the eugenist believes that better matings will be made, sometimes realized, sometimes insensibly.

Furthermore, if children from such matings are made an asset rather than a liability; if society ceases to penalize, in a hundred insidious ways, the parents of large and superior families, but honors and aids them instead, one may justifiably hope that the birth-rate in the most useful and happy part of the population will steadily increase.

Perhaps that is as far as it is necessary that the aim of eugenics should be defined; yet one can hardly ignore the philosophical aspect of the problem. Galton's suggestion that man should assist the course of his own evolution meets with the general approval of biologists; but when one asks what the ultimate goal of human evolution should be, one faces a difficult question. Under these circumstances, can it be said that eugenics really has a goal, or is it merely stumbling along in the dark, possibly far from the real road, of whose existence it is aware but of whose location it has no knowledge?

There are several routes on which one can proceed with the confidence that, if no one of them is the main road, at least it is likely to lead into the latter at some time. Fortunately, eugenics is, paradoxical as it may seem, able to advance on all these paths at once; for it proposes no definite goal, it sets up no one standard to which it would make the human race conform. Taking man as it finds him, it proposes to multiply all the types that have been found by past experience or present reason to be of most value to society. Not only would it multiply them in numbers, but also in efficiency, in capacity to serve the race.

By so doing, it undoubtedly fulfills the requirements of that popular philosophy which holds the aim of society to be the greatest happiness for the greatest number, or more definitely the increase of the totality of human happiness. To cause not to exist those who would be doomed from birth to give only unhappiness to themselves and those about them; to increase the number of those in whom useful physical and mental traits are well developed; to bring about an increase in the number of energetic altruists and a decrease in the number of the anti-social or defective; surely such an undertaking will come nearer to increasing the happiness of the greatest number, than will any temporary social palliative, any ointment for incurable social wounds. To those who accept that philosophy, made prominent by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and a host of other great thinkers, eugenics rightly understood must seem a prime necessity of society.

But can any philosophy dispense with eugenics? Take those to whom the popular philosophy of happiness seems a dangerous goal and to whom the only object of evolution that one is at present justified in recognizing is that of the perpetuation of the species and of the progressive conquest of nature, the acquiring of an ascendancy over all the earth. This is now as much a matter of self-preservation as it is of progress: although man no longer fights for life with the cave bear and saber-toothed tiger, the microbes which war with him are far more dangerous enemies than the big mammals of the past. The continuation of evolution, if it means conquest, is not a work for dilettantes and Lotos Eaters; it is a task that demands unremitting hard work.

To this newer philosophy of creative work eugenics is none the less essential. For eugenics wants in the world more physically sound men and women with greater ability in any valuable way. Whatever the actual goal of evolution may be, it can hardly be assumed by any except the professional pessimist, that a race made up of such men and women is going to be handicapped by their presence.