Heredity, race, and society.

  • Leslie Clarence Dunn
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity, race, and society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    be considered superficial and relatively quite unimpor tant. Hence, Christianity and other great religions have always taught (no matter what they practiced) that mankind is one great family in which brotherhood should ultimately prevail. An application of the above teachings to practical life and politics is the democratic idea which has grown and developed during almost two thousand years in Europe and more recently in America. Democracy ac cepts human diversity as a fact of experience, but never theless holds that all men have the same inalienable rights. Democratic society should, then, be adapted to the variable natures of its members. It would create such political, social, and economic arrangements as would furnish to each member the opportunities to develop the best potentialities of his personality and of his creative energies to the fullest possible extent. In so doing, democracy would take advantage of human diversity, and in fact preserve the unlikenesses. To many people the religious and democratic solu tions seem, however, impractical or unattractive. It is argued that all men are not born equal in ability or in capacity to develop the characteristics which are regard ed as useful or pleasing. Now, if some humans are well born and others are endowed more sparingly, then they are not equal in worth, and perhaps should not presume to claim equality in rights either. This is espe cially true if human differences are fixed in biological heredity, and consequently are inevitable and unalter able. The fate of every individual is, according to this view, very largely fixed by the Dice of Destiny hidden in his hereditary equipment. The doctrine of inherent inequality of men has been developed by many thinkers, starting with Plato in ancient Greece. More recently there was the Comte de Gobineau, a cultivated and intelligent French noble man who some ninety years ago wrote a book called Essay on the Inequality of Races. To Gobineau, the intellectual and emotional differences between the great white Nordic race and the inferior whites, yellows, and
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