I have been heard to say, often, that were I King I would
begin my reign with a cull. It might be politically incorrect to say it out
loud, but by god it’s a popular sentiment. The right-on Social Media Justice
Mob will pretend to be horrified but they are not averse to wishing for or celebrating
the death of their own hate figures; and given the means and opportunity to sterilise
every Tory there is hardly a Labour activist in the land who wouldn’t tacitly,
if not openly, endorse the sentiment.
Ben Bradley, the Conservative’s newly promoted Vice Chair
for Youth, has been under fire lately for some blogs and tweets he published
when he was a callow youth himself (not so long ago). He suggested that those
who can’t afford children should think twice about having them. He dared to
write: "Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can't
afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free," Cue the righteous
outrage from the usual suspects. Eugenicist! Burn him! Jordan Peterson is dead
right; it is but a short step from espousing these views to enacting them.
Today, eugenics is – like many past ideals – excoriated as
an inhumanity. But it was once at the forefront of progressive thinking; the most
applauded thinkers of the day dreamed of an improved human race. After all,
what’s not to desire – a healthy, intelligent, long-lived, low-disease population
is an indisputably high aspiration. And we still quietly do it by social means;
education, encouraging family planning, discouraging those with hereditary disadvantages,
emphasizing personal advancement. In short, coercion to ‘do the right thing’.
But a certain German Chancellor – among others - put paid
to wholescale societal planning by trying to accelerate the process. Nowadays, those
pesky human rights, which include the right to reproduce, get in the way,
although I’ve never been convinced by that supposedly basic imperative; I’ve
never felt the urge and I’m sure it could be controlled. If you are a walking cauldron
of the genetic soup and mental capacity to breed and rear untermenschen maybe your greatest gift to the furtherance of
mankind would be to voluntarily make yourself an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
Of course if you were sufficiently aware and had such a
conscience, then you wouldn’t be that person anyway; it’s a tricky one, isn’t
it? But the problem with trying to influence population from a top-down level
will always reside with who gets to make the decision. If Momentum’s Labour
Party were in power you could reasonably bet that they would pursue the chopping
down of grand family trees while creating entire plantations of future Labour
voters. But wouldn’t the Tories want to do much the same?
The latest crop of Labour voters, ready to harvest
It seems that state intervention is doomed to failure.
Just as well we all do eugenics at an individual level, even if we call it
something different. We choose our partners – what monsters we are! But anyway,
the basic idea has never gone away, I don’t think it ever will. These days we
try and improve the genetic stock, at least at a uni-generational level, by new
forms of medical treatment; gene therapy, gene editing, etc and few people bat
an eyelid. Would you like your children to be healthy and happy? Try eugenics! We’re
going to need a new name.
