Eugenics and disabilities

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Eugenics is the striving toward an ideal or standard human being. It’s often presented in the form of “improving” the human species, but as we have seen many times in the past and continue to see is that these “improvements” mainly reflect people’s personal preferences and biases.

From that also follows the notion that the lives of people with disabilities are not worth living and that we should therefore strive to have as few people as possible who deviate from that “ideal”, such as people who are deaf or who have Down, also comes from this eugenic point of view.

People without disabilities tend to misjudge the quality of life of people with disabilities and are often not aware of the rich, fulfilling lives that also people with disabilities can have.

Countries like Iceland have eradicated people with Down syndrome from the population whereas in the United States, more and more people with Down syndrome are graduating from college.

Ones you start enabling people instead of disabling them, empowering them instead of locking them up in institutions and depriving them from everything that makes life worth living, you will see huge changes.

Eugenics is a 19th-century British idea. It was a guy called Francis Galton – a cousin of Charles Darwin’s – who came up with it.

Another 19th-century British idea is utilitarianism, which is a cold and calculating way of looking at life. Jeremy Bentham, the man who began this school of thought and later expanded on it with his disciple John Stuart Mill proposed to round up the beggars because he felt that their visible presence decreased the happiness of the more fortunate. It offended their delicate senses.

He wanted the poor in workhouses, in an order that, also according to him, would reduce unhappiness.

He wanted the deaf and dumb “next to raving lunatics, or persons of profligate conversation”, aged women next to “prostitutes and loose women”, and the blind next to the “shockingly deformed”.

This is the opposite of accepting human diversity. This is a way of classifying humans, of declaring some humans as less worthy, as less valuable than others.

This is avoidance of people who are not run-off-the-mill and declares them lesser beings. It also ignores and insults their intelligence.

John Stuart Mill, who was the other inventor of utilitarianism interestingly called his wife disabled by society. He called this a social disability. But as highly privileged as was, he failed to see that this also applied to many others.

Bentham was ahead of his time in his endeavours to make homosexuality a private matter instead of a crime. Unfortunately, he apparently failed to see the need to prevent that child sex abuse would also be considered merely a private matter.

Mill was home-schooled and his father started him on reading classical Greek at age 3. He began learning Latin soon after, and read Homer in the original Latin at age 7 or thereabouts.

His mentor Bentham went to Oxford University at age 12, where he studied law. As he was well off, he did not need a job and was free to pursue his own pleasures. He was one of the founders of what later became University College London.

Utilitarianism had a massive impact on British society because Bentham and Mill weren’t academics tucked away in ivory towers. Bentham was a legal reformer and Mill was a civil servant and an MP. Notably many of Mill’s general ideas were well known among the working class.

The male, white, wealthy athletic hero still remains on a pedestal as something to strive for. Society still does not respect all human beings people equally. The pedestal is crumbling, thankfully, and we’re slowly creating more space for all human beings so that they everyone can flourish.

Now ponder the following two quotes.

“The only way of cutting off the constant stream of idiots and imbeciles and feeble-minded persons who help to fill our prisons and workhouses, reformatories, and asylums is to prevent those who are known to be mentally defective from producing offspring. Undoubtedly the best way of doing this is to place these defectives under control. Even if this were a hardship to the individual it would be necessary for the sake of protecting the race.”
– The Spectator, 25 May 1912

“My life would be rather simple if people would consider me a person rather than a thing to eradicate.”
– Nicolas Joncour, 2016

Nicolas Joncour is autistic and has dyspraxia, which means that he does not speak. But he thinks and writes well and he also plays the piano. He describes himself as a disability rights activist.

Nelson, Fraser (2016) The return of eugenics. The Spectator, April 2 issue. spectator.co.uk/article/the-return-of-eugenics

Florida Center for Instructional Technology (1997-2013) A teacher's guide to the Holocaust. Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida. fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/people/victims.htm

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