Yesterday someone showed up in the comments on the Quality of Life Post to complain that Eugenics shouldn't be a dirty word, and wouldn't humanity be better off without say hemophilia, and he wasn't scared of it because the Nazis were for it.
Which honestly is a caldron of a) biological ignorance b)historical ignorance c)wishful thinking that separates the dread disease from the carrier.
I'll start with the last. When answering the comment, for some reason, I thought of it as the genetic side of it, perhaps because in my future worlds the sort of genetic manipulation where someone could go in and remove the gene that causes hemophilia is possible, and I've been living in my fiction way too much.
But the truth is, right now, where we live, the only way to "eliminate undesirable genetic traits" in a population is to kill or sterilize the carriers. And I'm again, no matter how crazy you think this might be, going to tell you that killing people for their own good is one of the greatest evils ever. Because it's never for their own good, but for the interests and pleasure of those doing the killing. This is then wrapped and disguised in altruism.
You can't know whether someone is perfectly happy with the quality of life that seems terrible to you. And you can't judge whether someone with some kind of genetic defect will make a positive contribution in the world. (Even complete morons might make someone else smile. Heaven knows we keep dogs and cats who can't talk and are very dumb compared even to human toddlers, because keeping them and looking after them makes us happy.) If you have to dressed killing someone as "for their own good" you know d*mn well it's a bad thing. And the question is always always always "where does it stop?" I have perfect empathy with people who care for people at the end of their life and who think it would be best to spare horrible suffering for a few more hours or days or months, since the end seems inevitable. I'd even trust a few people, personally known to me to make that decision for me personally and if I had no other qualms about it (I do. They're private and none of your business.) We watched my FIL unable to communicate, move, anything for the months it took him to die, and it certainly isn't how I'd prefer to go.
The problem is every time we grant anyone, be it government, caretakers or institutions the right to make that decision and determine that "the end is inevitable, why not shorten the suffering" it always ends up in the excesses of the MAID program in Canada. Not sometimes. ALWAYS. We now have a long history of places that have allowed people to die to escape suffering (which more or less translates to persuading people to die so other people can stop suffering) and it always ends up in killing people deemed to have "lives unworthy of living" including the handicapped and depressed teenagers.
As someone who, at 33, was bullied into signing to have a nearly-always fatal procedure (in the state I was in by then) because "After all, what good are you doing your husband and children, and how much are you costing them" by doctors and nurses, in a concerted effort, I want all of you who believe doctors and nurses should have that power to think of the worst doctor you know having power over your lives when you're helpless. (My husband came in before they could do the procedure, pointed out I was so far out of compus mentis just on low oxygen alone that the document would never stand, and that he'd sue them to their back teeth if they tried it. Then he fired the doctor who had ring-led the initiative. Things he didn't even know included browbeating me on how useless I was because I was "only" a housewife. Younger son was under one, older son was 3. I was just starting my writing career. And I've lived 28 years since then. And done a lot of things.)
Yes, sure, hemophilia is bad. But it is not as bad as the life of the heir of Russia seems to indicate. While hemophiliacs at least in the nineteenth century and early twentieth (I haven't checked current state of the art treatment) lived diminished lives and tended to die young, a lot of Victoria's descendants with the disease got married, had children and died in their thirties. And a lot of their children are free from the defect. Who are you to judge their lives as unworthy? They weren't unworthy to them. And again, some of them, at this historical distance at least, seem to have had much fuller and happier lives than "non-defective" people.
Same goes for mandatory sterilization which interferes with people's ability to judge their own lives and make their own decisions. While I would throw no stones at a woman who carried the gene for hemophilia and chose to never have children -- because I can imagine the pain and heartbreak -- not only do these women have children (the majority of them) without the defect (I believe only ONE of Victoria's children had it) but again, who are you to judge that their children's lives will be unworthy.
And before you say "but the species." This is where the stupidity about biology comes in. At the current rate of biological knowledge, we don't actually know what's best for the species. In fact, unless you have a crystal ball, it is highly unlikely we ever will.
Look, genes link with other genes in weird ways -- here it bleeds to point one and my imaginary worlds -- and it could be that if you eliminated hemophilia you also would eliminate some highly needed gene or fragment of one. Which a million years down the road will link up to another fragment of a gene in totally random chance, and thereby give humans the ability to live a thousand years. Or survive below zero. Or whatever. We don't know and we can't know. And while I am somewhat agnostic on being against tampering with the genes to eliminate the "bad thing" since that at least does have the potential to save humans a lot of suffering, I doubt our ability to do it advisedly in any time frame relevant to this discussion. (Say the next 100 or 200 years.)
More importantly thought, even given that ability by some magic, guess what? Evolution isn't stopped or even slowed down. Mutations still occur all the time. (No one but us Mutties here.) You probably carry three or four no one has even bothered to track down. And 99% of mutations are bad. Most are bad at the level that isn't worthy tracking down, such as giving you a slightly higher tendency to hang nails or ugly hair. But some are doozies.
You could perhaps eliminate hemophilia, given enough knowledge and ability, but in the hundred or so years you are doing it, three things just as bad or worse will show up.
Lest we forget Queen Victoria herself, grandmother and grave digger of empires (the later due to being a carrier of hemophilia) had no idea where this had come from because it had never "been a disease of our people." And it was in fact either the legacy of a long ago forgotten ancestor that just came up in genetic shuffling OR a new mutation in her line. (Though it existed in others.)
To cleanse humanity of "everything bad" would take all of humanity's results, take forever and, because we are still humans, be subjected to the same kind of creep we see with abortion and euthanasia.
Because there's money in research, and because people are full of good intentions and want to spare others suffering, we'd start by editing the human genome to get rid of hemophilia, and we'd end by editing out genes for ugly faces, ingrown toe nails, depressive tendencies, inability to manage money, a tendency to talk back, and more and more "untraceable" and slippery characteristics until all there was left of humanity would be an army of look alike, amiable robots. That is supposing anything was left, because nothing is as fatal to a species as a restricted gene set.
And no, eugenics isn't a bad word because Nazis. Eugenics is a bad word because right now it means killing people. And once humans start killing people for their own good, it never stops with whatever category the society has decided needs killing for being "lives unworthy of living." (Not to mention that changes throughout history, btw.) Once you start running the killing, the mass graves fill up right quick.
The one thing that Nazis have stopped, rightly or wrongly, is serious study of human populations, because everyone is afraid that some bright boy or girl will decide to eliminate that population over there, because obviously they have bad genes.
To an extent, the extent that refers to "races" as perceived right now, this is no great loss. You see, "race" as the Nazis saw it was a ridiculous thing, because what they actually called "race" to things that were no such thing, including culture. Racially speaking most Jews (except for about 10% of their DNA) were basically Germans. It was their culture or perceived culture (most of them were also perfectly assimilated) that was different.
To study "races" understood as groups that share the same characteristics, we'd need to be either FAR tighter in racial definition, to the point that Portugal, tiny a country and genetically homogeneous as it is, would be something like 10 different races, or far broader, where everyone with skin from so pale they burn by thinking of the sun to lighter than toasted bread is one race.
And the later, at a guess, would devolve into utter incoherence and be ripe for the superimposing of the bias of the researchers.
Could there be interest in studying the human genome and physical characteristics correlated to mental or behavioral ones?
Sure. But those characteristics would have to be very tightly defined, and humans being the scrambled mess we are, again, it would probably devolve into "But I say subject A is more stubborn than subject B because he would not eat the spam and she would." We really don't need to pour more money down the rathole of irreproducible studies.
At a guess the valuable researches of the kind would be something like "people with this genetic fragment tend to have brown hair and wake up at five thirty am." And I think we already have those. Eyes 23 and me report.
So, the Nazis didn't even really stop the valuable/possibly useful human genome study.
Anything more than that and we'll end up again in the search for the "gay gene" which can't be found because at a guess sexual orientation (though certain types tend to run in families over the LONG run) seems to to be determined by a combination of genes, plus conditions of gestation, plus early childhood experiences. ALL sexual orientation, not just the ones that deviate from the norm.
All these things being more or less untraceable is a good thing, because humans being what they are, the maniacs must take anything and push it to eleven. Which means if let's say the "gay gene" were traceable, I imagine we'd end up with countries made up entirely of gay people, countries where gay people were never born, and some unspeakable combinations that none of us, right now can think of.
I can look at it and think it amazing fodder for a dystopic future world, but not one I'd like to write, except maybe as a comedy, thank you so much.
It seems eugenics, in the end, comes from each individual human's idea that things are badly arranged and that those people, over there, would be much better if only they were more like him/properly arranged.
The results of applying such notions are always ridiculous and appalling in equal measures.
It takes all kinds to make a world. At least a world worth living in.
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This blog is reader funded. I don't have a grant or a patron. You're my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you're interested, go here.
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