Breeding the Super-man?

We note this week the blog-musings of a government advisor in which he claims people of colour are innately less intelligent than white people. This same advisor is also on record as supporting the idea of compulsory contraception for the lower classes in order to avert the emergence of a mentally retarded underclass, because by certain selective and elitist measures, poverty – as well as colour – is held as an indicator of low intelligence, all of which is passed on genetically, thus souring a nation’s gene pool. Said advisor, having been outed by the lefty press, has now gone, but it ought to worry us – even if it does not entirely surprise us – how anyone espousing such views might ever have crossed the hallowed threshold of Number 10, all of which suggests the direction of travel is pretty much as we feared it would be.

My own understanding is that intelligence can indeed, in part, be inherited – perhaps as much as 50% – but whether we’re able to capitalise on those particular genes depends very much also on the environment we grow up in. Poverty does therefore have a bearing on intelligence, but only in so far as it’s correlated with poor nutrition and the multiplicity of social stresses that might be suffered when one is grindingly poor.

All things being equal, intelligence is gifted with no regard to social class or race. Just because you’re a king does not mean you’re also a sage. Conversely, if you grow up in a poor family, but feel otherwise secure and loved, you’ve as much chance of being an Einstein as anyone else. So, next time you’re passing one of those tower-blocks where the nation houses its poor, pick a window and imagine the life that lives there. The only difference between the potential of that life, and the most accomplished – and by that I don’t mean the wealthiest, but say an artist, poet, musician, dancer, industrialist, scientist, and, yes, a decent politician – is opportunity. In a successful society the door to opportunity is opened by talent, ambition and hard work. In a failing society it is opened by money.

When looking to science for solutions, we do well to be careful with the sciences from which we choose to selectively quote. If we want a healthy, happy population, if we wish to avoid that so called “underclass”, all that’s needed is the means to earn a living decent enough to put good food on the table, and the social infrastructure to provide a pathway for us all to realise our dreams. We do not need a program of enforced sterilisation, or selective breeding to maintain the vitality of a nation. We have been there before, all be it a long time ago with the evil of eugenics and its ideal of a super-race. This was a line of thinking that ended at Nuremberg, but only after the letting of much blood and a generation scarred by unimaginable cruelty.

But that we speak of eugenics again, now, in 2020 it seems to me we have begun another retrograde phase in the evolution of self awareness, compassion and simple decency, that the eugenicists cannot see how the very eugenics of which they speak and its aims of racial purity and intellectual supremacy, is itself evidence of rottenness, theirs the impure and soulless thinking we could well do without visiting again.

I hope this is something we can wake up to and avert by our collective revulsion, and that we don’t have to live through the first half of the twentieth century all over again before we do. But I look at where we are now, and I’m not optimistic. It’s one thing to be clever, quite another to be wise and honourable. I’m sure there are a lot of very clever people running the show, but at the same time we seem to be seriously lacking wisdom, while all sense of honour is routinely trampled into the dirt of lies, and political expedience.