If you want to improve a country, perhaps one way would be to improve the people who live in that country. Some among the "progressives" hit on a novel way to bring about such improvement: breed better people. The attempt to improve the genetic heritage of America (and to hasten the evolution of the species) led to what's called the eugenics movement. Please read through the Wikipedia summary of the eugenics movement. What do you see here that suggests that there is a dark side to the progressive movement?
Monday, June 8, 2015
The Eugenics Movement
If you want to improve a country, perhaps one way would be to improve the people who live in that country. Some among the "progressives" hit on a novel way to bring about such improvement: breed better people. The attempt to improve the genetic heritage of America (and to hasten the evolution of the species) led to what's called the eugenics movement. Please read through the Wikipedia summary of the eugenics movement. What do you see here that suggests that there is a dark side to the progressive movement?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Eugenics movement was originally intended to improve the genes of the human race, but turned into a mass genocide during the Holocaust during World War 2 and denied the basic human right to reproduce to those with "inferior" traits.
ReplyDeleteIn what is called the eugenics movement people intended to improve the genes of the human race. They would reproduce people with what they thought was great genes so the offspring would have great genes. They did not want to reproduce people with what they thought were not great genes. This lead to a mass genocide during the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteSamantha Chastain
Obviously a mass genocide has more than a little darkness to it. While some may claim a noble original intention, the negative affiliation of Eugenics with the Holocaust is one that will almost certainly never vanish. While a great progressive push, in the sense of trying to get rid of the negative societal traits and such, there are always extremists such as Hitler and the Nazi party who take things too far. The entire movement had a good idea, but Hitler obviously had an entirely wrong idea to apply Eugenics demographically so as to reduce the population and produce the "master race" so to speak. On top of Eugenics, this may give light to the fact that there may have been other movements etc that we have not yet covered that produced other potentially dark results as well.
ReplyDeleteThe Eugenics Movement was thought to be a well intended improvement of the human civilization by those who supported it. I can see where they thought it was a good idea because having bronze as well as brains would be considered ideal in most situations. The idea that what they were doing may be wrong and considered inhumane seemed to just go right over their heads. After increased popularity of the idea, the movement spread to other countries throughout the world. Eugenics was particularly popular during the Holocaust when Nazis would sterilize people who had genes that didn't meet the standards that they were looking for. This gave Eugenics a bad reputation and was finally deemed a violation of basic human rights. I guess it takes mass genocide to make people open their eyes to irrational decisions.
ReplyDelete-Meghan Conn-
The eugenics movement was supposed to improve the human race by cutting out the inferior traits in people. This was a very inhumane and degrading process. It was very discriminatory. This turned into a mass murder of people with "inferior" traits
ReplyDeleteThe eugenics movement was supposed to improve the human race by cutting out the inferior traits in people. This was a very inhumane and degrading process. It was very discriminatory. This turned into a mass murder of people with "inferior" traits
ReplyDelete