EUGENICS AND RACE THEORIES

Eugenics and Race theories

Eugenics and Race theories

Introduction

“Eugenics” describes a movement to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding, based on the assumption that differences in human intelligence, character and temperament are largely due to differences in heredity (Nimni 1991 pp.67). Francis Galton, statistical innovator and half-cousin of Charles Darwin, is regarded as the founder of modern eugenics. Eugenics' “first object,” said Yerushalmi (2002 pp. 26) , “is to check the birth rate of the unfit instead of allowing them to come into being . . . the second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriages and the healthful rearing of children.” Less well known is that a crude eugenic sorting of groups into deserving and undeserving classes crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard, 2003). Reform-minded economists of the Progressive Era defended exclusionary labor and immigration legislation on grounds that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers, whom they labeled “parasites,” “the unemployable,” “low-wage races” and the “industrial residuum.” Removing the unfit, went the argument, would uplift superior, deserving workers. 

Discussion

The ultimate lightning rod for racial hierarchies and the divining of relative worth came after 1789 and the rise of modern nationalism in Europe. After the French Revolution, many European countries became nations, defined particularly by the fact that citizenship would now be based on birth, residency within national territory, and allegiance to law or a constitution. Nationalism, in a sense, was a great equalizer, placing all those living within the national territory on an equal footing as Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian, German, Pole, Dane, and so on. Social and economic class, it was believed, would not matter; all citizens would be equal, based on their rights as human beings. Yet, defining inclusion in the nation was also invariably a process of exclusion. Nationalists of the 1800s, even deliberately nonracist ones like Johann Gottfried von Herder, worked very hard to define not only who belonged but, by default, who did not. Behaviors, attitude, language, dress, and appearance all played roles in assessing who was of the nation and who was not. This kind of cultural nationalism, and the rise of Romanticism that sought to explore the passionate, irrational side of humanity—not just the rational side that the Enlightenment promoted—worked together to fashion the ethnic nation(Solway 1995 pp.97). A state defined by ethnicity saw itself as a spiritual entity, with citizenship tied to a soul that one was born with and to an uncontrollable, indelible personal drive to act, think, and feel in a particular way. Even more important, this belonging was natural, transmitted down through the ages, so that one was connected inimitably to one's forebears. In the mid-to late nineteenth century, the Rechtstaat (state defined by rights) transformed into the Volkstaat, more an imagined ethnic community than an actual historical or territorial entity.

One of the first and most important thinkers of the nineteenth century to elaborate this view of society was Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, who began ...