Careful with that axe, Eugene

 Adam Rutherford, the BBC’s favourite geneticist, currently has a series on Radio Four – Bad Blood – about the evils of eugenics. So popular was it at one time that parents in 1920s USA appropriated the term itself to name their children. Then along came Hitler and the practice fell out of favour. But, come on, is the notion all that bad, really? We can’t be unique amongst all species that humanity cannot be improved upon by a bit of selective breeding.

And of course, the wealthy very much do breed selectively, and for the same reasons. Why would you not want to improve your bloodline? Did not wealthy families engage in arranged marriages to exactly that end? Do not companies partner with other agencies to improve their chances of success and longevity? Did the west not ban sibling marriage because of the negative effects on genetics? And surely the multicultural dream of New Labour is an exercise [largely failed] in human engineering on a massive scale?

But no, the use of the word eugenics today is much like the use of the word racism. It is an instant put-down to those who dare to suppose that the human race could do better. And while we might not know the ultimate recipe for success, few among us will have never harboured the opinion that certain people should be discouraged from breeding. But try to set out an argument for ‘better’ management of our human stock and you will be backed into a corner by accusations of being a eugenicist.

Our prisons are crowded and had we still mental asylums they would be overflowing, except all of their potential inmates are out on the streets in plain view. The slums are back, teeming with human detritus with little in the way of prospects, and as our refusal to tackle the monster of uneven population growth grows more stubborn, the problem grows with it.

Our lower orders – for there really are such things – are idle, displaced in the labour market by people with whom we share little in the way of common bonds or culture. Our entire country is flooded with unproductive drones at a time when we are being told that the demand for low-skilled labour is diminishing, yet can’t be met by our own. And isn’t this entire exercise itself a form of national eugenics, replacing our actual indigenous population with a different breeding stock? It is little wonder that better off native born Brits are deciding, whether for financial or societal reasons, to limit their families.

The government’s response? Cuts everywhere. In infrastructure, in health and social care, in policing, in education, in energy security. The list goes on but one thing is for certain, it is not getting better for any but a select few. The country is unrecognisable from only a few decades ago, maybe even just two decades ago. The one thing which is not being cut is immigration. If the axe is to fall anywhere it really ought to be used to split apart all the false arguments used to silence us. Cut the crap and let us have those verboten debates, or else watch the whole thing fall further into disarray and dismemberment.

In Praise of Eugenics.

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.

Brave or what?

Ah, the wondrous world of the terminally offended is a cornucopia of schadenfreude and is truly hilarious to behold. At any suggestion you could take some responsibility for our own life prepare for a flurry of indignation as folks of a certain political persuasion accuse you of monstrous motives. I heard on the radio a few days ago a teenage girl, newly back out of care and living with her mother, saying without a hint of awareness that she had had no other choice but to fly into a rage and strike out. Her mother agreed; it was the stress of being a teenager, it wasn’t her fault and society was to blame or some such crap.

One of the unintended consequences of universal welfare is this idea that, not only will the state provide, it will also step in and absolve you of any responsibility for your own actions. “He just lost it!” say the onlookers, “He flew into a rage. She provoked him. The government must do something.” And on and on it goes. Pleas of insanity are lodged and a ‘crime of passion’ is somehow at least partly excused by the animal inability to control an instinct for destruction. Anger management, ADHD, despair, abandonment, dereliction of duty; all symptoms or causes of a great malaise in western society leading to  greater demand than ever for ‘behavioural support’ in the classroom and beyond.

And then there’s all the whining over this ‘glass floor’ nonsense; how dare responsible parents who can provide for their children, er, provide for their children? How very dare they? Another LSE ‘study’ revealing the bleeding obvious that responsible people, paying virtually all the tax and thus propping up the whole of society are ‘unfairly’ preventing their own from sliding down to the arse-end. “The research suggests there is a clear correlation between the social background of a child's grandfather and eventual labour market success.” I should bloody well hope so, too, otherwise what’s the point? The predictable response from the caring left? Unfair! They shriek, as if the excuses they use for their own failings – they can’t help behaving that way – are somehow not applicable to those of better circumstances, who also instinctively defend their own.

And then of course the Brave New Worlders wade in, crying ‘eugenics’ at the suggestions that, in the future, genetic screening could identify the less academically capable. In this piece by Brendan O’Neill he concludes, as should anybody with an ounce of perspective: “Let’s not tell schoolkids their genes made them fail their GCSEs. Instead let’s introduce them to Renaissance through the idea that everyone has it within their power to be as great as they want to be. We aren’t born this way; we make ourselves.” The horror! And yet and yet... genetic screening is routinely used to detect physical conditions, why not mental ones as well? (I've been doing my bit, by the way: here)

Leftism... in a picture.

But apart from all that it strikes me we have a simple choice in life, really: We can accept the facts that life is hard, not naturally equitable and that it favours those born into advantage and then determine that we will seek out such advantages for ourselves, the hard way. Or we can bitch and moan and insist that those who have built the foundations for the future success of their own should undermine that very possibility by simply giving it away to those who see it as a right. Once again, the blinkered left simply cannot see that ‘equal rights’ does not equate to equal outcomes. If only we could genetically screen for leftism.

Oilseed Rape

Before anybody gets the wrong end of my stick – you know what crappy readers we breed in the UK – let me state that rape is wrong. So put away your instinctive repulsion and hatred and read on. Louise Mensch is quite right. But so (dons armour) is George Galloway. They’re both right. A bit.

Where do babies come from? I think you get them free if you grow up on certain estates – they have helpful local facilitators who will readily get you pregnant if you can’t manage it on your own. The deposit is a few bottles of counterfeit booze, a few happy pills and a bit of peer pressure and the balance is taken care of by the state. 

If you watch any wildlife programme you will see the familiar routines. The males circle the grazing herd, often in small marauding packs, waiting their chance to pick off the weaker members. Sex is often peremptory and frequently violent, but is shrugged off as part of the circle of life. Consent is a given unless firmly and physically revoked. It's the same on the wildlife programmes.

We like to think, as civilised humans, that we dance to a more choreographed and sensitive etiquette but, at heart, we are little different and some of you owe your existence to an act that in some interpretations might be described as rape. Retrospective withdrawal of consent, otherwise known as sobering up, has had devastating consequences for all involved, especially the men.

Louise Mensch refers to ‘had it coming’ rape, as if there was no such thing. She should spend more time watching the city streets on Friday night, or David Attenborough documentaries – same thing. To expect that drunken, loutish youths, high on various substances and flouting every other behavioural convention will restrain themselves once encouraged is a triumph of hopeful thinking over human nature. In young, ill-educated male culture, rape is part of the language; they even listen to rape music. 

Before you think I’m somehow sticking up for George Galloway (as a man I do realise I’m not allowed any actual opinion on this subject) I should point out that my contempt for the odious little worm has no bounds. Yet in his annoying and repulsive loathsome manner he was stating the nature of reality, as opposed to the way we wish it were.  So what's it to be, Galloway or Mensch; G or M? Or maybe both => GM.

Be careful what you wish for...

Because help is at hand. Professor Julian Savulescu thinks we can genetically engineer for a brighter, more intelligent and less violent future. If he is right then the foul spectre of rape will disappear from our vocabulary, along with the dwindling population; then Louise Mensch and George Galloway can hold forth about eugenics instead.