Eugenics: Should we breed the best people?
Are you well-bred? Do you know people who are ill-bred? Do you respect your betters? Does your family get the respect that it deserves? This is another line of questioning: The first questions come from popular thinking that is more than a hundred years old. The last two are modern. Where does thinking like this come from, besides someone’s imagination? One old source is Social Darwinism. When Charles Darwin published his ideas about “The Origin of the Species” he looked back in time, to the beginning of life. Darwin’s ideas were retrospective, he directed us back in time, to origins. He had a theory about where we came from. Charles Darwin’s ideas were very popular, and evolutionary thinking came to us like a revolution. I believe one reason for the popularity of Darwin’s backward-looking ideas, is that some people looked forward. In England, for example, people saw classes in society; as superior upper classes, who were born to rule, and the inferior lower, and working classes, who needed to know their place. That is ancient …