Words, words, words. In my lifetime I have finally swallowed the hollowness of words, or perhaps I mean the weakness of them.
Debate never ceases to rage over what is right and wrong, good and evil, etc. – but manipulating what is deemed legal or criminal serves in no way to change the behavior of people, only the classification of such.
Laws and condemnation do little to sway the human animal. All attempts to curb destructive inclinations and acts deemed negative are, by and large, flawed unless they confront the basic factors of influence. Unfortunately I can only extrapolate from personal observation and say that we are guided by example, etiquette and tradition, though emotion and need can effectively bypass our normal modus operandi.
The debate over manipulation, especially in the areas of breeding and genetic modification (since they have the highest ‘failure’ rate), has only served to push these practices underground, making conditions for the experimented even worse, not to mention that off-world policing has proven quite impossible – if you don’t like the rules on Earth, there are only financials stopping you going elsewhere.
My earlier belittling of words aside, they can become abnormally powerful if they get dirty. And here I come to talk about eugenics, a word so dirty it was practically wiped from the records (which could happen more often than we think since there would be no proof of a successful wiping).
Eugenics itself was practiced world-wide before the Nazis* made it a dirty word, and as such all references were changed; textbooks rewritten, scientific journals renamed, and strong denials echoed all around.
With our incorruptible belief in miracles, humanity convinces itself that uncomfortable concepts can be bypassed simply by changing the words used to describe them. I’m not convinced: I believe in calling a spade a spade, if not a dirty old shovel.
At its origins, eugenics was the study of the self-determination of human evolution. By whatever means, with whatever parameters or aims, the 20th century attempts were both monstrous and clumsy. Still hung up on ‘ideal’ concepts of humanity, governments tortured their populations with voluntary and involuntary sterilization, mating restrictions, segregation and extermination. There were some noble aims such as eliminating certain hereditary diseases, but the strange dogma of the time considered that race-mixing led to ‘impurity,’ and that civilization itself, by looking after its weakest members, was going against the evolutionary goal of only the fi ttest surviving (which wasn’t how Darwin originally phrased it).
Eu-genetics, the modern counterpart, quickly branched off from its ancestor, not just in scientific method but in its aims. Eu-genetics does not divide its categories into positive and negative (which are socially and culturally determined), nor does it aim for homogeneity. Rather it encourages diversity as the real strength of the species.
As a privatized industry, it also lacks the coercion of national schemes and is motivated by individual competition and the desire to give one’s progeny all the advantages money can buy. Here, of course, it reinforces the economic divide as the rich can afford to make their children far ‘superior.’
The current rhetoric of ‘conscious evolution’ – as well as claims that it is merely technically assisted evolution – seem eerily similar to the sales points attached to the original eugenics, but to them I ask: What’s the rush? Where do we think we are going anyway?
* Nazis, or Nazism succeeded the failing Weimar Republic. Largely defined by the ideology of Adolf Hitler who led Germany into the second World War, and slaughtered people on the pretense of superiority.
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