Preview: Eugenics Endnotes

One of the things I want to start with is the scope of these past two episodes.

early British eugenics movement.

It has so many qualifiers in that statement.

I thought a lot about the scope of this topic because I know that everyone comes to this topic with their priors.

We've all heard the word eugenics before, and we think that we know what it means, and that makes it harder to talk about than if we were coming to it fresh.

But the reason I chose the early British eugenics movement, and pretty much excluded anything but that, was basically for two reasons.

So, the first is, the movement was so different in different places at different times, anything broader would have risked being too simplistic to the point of just being unusable or wrong.

And even just talking about the early British eugenics movement, it could become difficult to hone in on the perspective because even within that limited group, the views were so broad.

Which is why I thought it was helpful to boil it down to these three core ideas.

One, they believed in evolution through natural selection.

Two, they believe that it was directed through a process of parenthood and inheritance.

And three, crucially, and this is what makes or breaks it, is that they believe that people should take an active role in the process to achieve a specific outcome.

If you believe those three things, you could be in the club.

From there, it was only a matter of what should be done and to what end.

But the second reason I chose this scope is because I think it's the purest distillation of the movement.

It's eugenics in its idealist origin.

Before it had public support and government backing, when it was trying to convince people to do what might be the hardest and most revolutionary thing anyone can try to convince other people to do, which is to fundamentally change their values, to judge their lives and their national project through the lens of eugenics, to ask themselves at the end of their lives, did I... contribute to creating a better future generation, whatever that would mean to them.

And I think this is something more interesting about what they believed than a lot of what we already associate with the eugenics movement.

Okay, so I just wanted to say that because early British eugenics movement was becoming a bit of a mouthful and starting to sound like a legal disclaimer.

So from now on, I'm just going to refer to it as the eugenics movement, unless I am talking about another time and place.