Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    431/534 (page 415)
    EUGENICS AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES 415 convince us that no amount of intellectual power will suffice in the absence of really civilized, socialized attitudes. Unless it can be shown that the necessary attitudes can be secured through a process of selective breeding, and that quickly, biological eugenics must remain largely an academic amusement, pursuing researches that may ultimately be important, but, for the pressing needs of the present, futile, and without appreciable influence. Suppose it were possible to put a program of genetic eugenics into wide application at once, breeding for better brain power. That power, in the absence of a profound change in our attitudes, woiild continue to function primarily in the service of the combative and acquisitive instincts, to aid in the amassment of individual and corporate wealth, the perpetuation of nationalistic frictions, and very likely an indefinite series of world wars. How then would our condition be improved? Are you able to suppose that, leaving the attitudes of the propertied middle classes what they now are, a middle class birth rate equal to that of the working classes would bring us nearer a peaceful operation of the great Society? Or that, indefinitely perpetuating the philosophy of self-help and individual rights, and proceeding to breed a race of highly intelligent workers, industrial unrest would diminish? Should we not have in either case an intensification of class animosities? And is it not tolerably clear that even should the case for a sweeping program of genetic eugenics be put on an indisputable scientific basis, the possibility of carrying out any such program would be conditioned by the general diffusion of the requisite social attitudes in the population at large? So far as attitudes incompatible with a worthy and workable society are the outgrowth of traditional, hold-over political and economic philosophies, they can be gradually transformed through persistent education. But so far as they are rooted in instinctive inheritance they can be eliminated only through social selection. Time alone can tell to what extent our perverse attitudes are thus rooted. But this is sure: before any effective artificial selection for a more socially instinctivated population is attempted, we must promote every movement that will give freedom and force to the expression of the social instincts which we have—especially sympathy and workmanship—and remove the cultural obstacles to toleration, co¬ operation, and the sense of social obligation. We shall ultimately probably learn that reversed social selection, and undesirable assortative mating play a much larger part than we now realize in the perpetuation of temperamental types and attitudes maladapted to the requirements of the Great Society. Undesirable assortative mating