Utopian and/or Dystopian Visions:
Eugenics
Allan Weiss's Notes:
Contexts:
I. The Economic and Social Background
- Exploration & Exploitation
- Imperialism
- Slavery
II. The Scientific Background
- Race in Philosophy and Science
- Lamarck and Inherited Characteristics
- Linnaeus and Classification
- Enlightenment Views of Race
- Romantic Views of Race
- The Grotesque: Frankenstein Once More
- Primitivism and “Beasts”
- Comparative Anatomy: Measuring Skulls
- James Hunter
- J. F. Blumenbach
- William Lawrence
- James C. Prichard
- Samuel Smith
- Georges Cuvier
- Charles Darwin and Race
- Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism
- Eugenics
- Frances Galton
- “Hereditary Talent and Character” (1865)
- F. C. S. Schiller: Positive and Negative Eugenics
- Ludwig Gumplowicz, Race and State (1875)
- Degeneration Revisited: Max Nordau, H. G. Wells,
etc.
- Charles Davenport
- American Eugenics Society
- Eugenics Education Society
- Havelock Ellis
- The
Problem of Race-Regeneration (1911)
- The
Task
of Social Hygiene (1912)
- H. G. Wells
- Neville Chamberlain
- George Bernard Shaw
- R. R. Rentoul, Race
Culture or Race Suicide?
(1906
- Lothrop Stoppard, The Rising Tide of Colour Against
White-World Supremacy (1921)
Aldous Huxley:
- Biography
- Views
- Brave New World
- Eugenics or Industrialization?
- Utopia or Dystopia?
- Satire and the Dystopian Novel
Peter Fruchter's
Notes:
Review
Appreciating
fairness, equality and social justice
Abolition
of private property – an idea whose time keeps coming
Going
all the way: Zamyatin’s abolition of interpersonal privacy
Grade
sharing: a practical pedagogic experiment
What’s
wrong with global sharing for a better social sandbox?
Eugenics
If eliminating every disparity from
society does not
suffice to bring universal happiness and eliminate human conflict --
does that
mean we have to give up on utopian societies? By
no means. Instead of
redesigning more fair societies to make human beings happier and stop
fighting? Why not re-design human beings
to be happier and stop fighting -- and thereby bring about more ideal
utopian
societies that way?
From Paul Fayter's lecture notes:
In the nineteenth
century,
biblical views of history as linear or teleological, aimed at a coming
apocalypse, and the dawn of the "Kingdom of God" (a new world of
justice, righteousness, equality, and peace) were overtaken by secular
myths of
scientific progress and salvation, theories of biological and social
evolution,
and assumptions about racial superiority--and inferiority.
H.G.
Wells, whose Time Machine (1895) was an implicitly eugenic warning
against
biological degeneration, rejected Christianity and became a disciple of
Darwinism. In his 1902 book, Anticipations of the Mechanical and
Scientific
Progress upon Human Life and Thought (pp. 298-300), Wells envisaged a
future
"New Republic" in which eugenics and
mass euthanasia play the same roles that they would in Hitler's "New
Order":
the
ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system
which will
dominate the world-state, will be shaped primarily to favour the
procreation of
what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity--beautiful strong
bodies,
clear and powerful minds....And the method that nature has followed
hitherto in
the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from
propagating
weakness...is death....The men of the New Republic...will have an ideal
that
will make killing worth the while.
The new
"scientific
ethics" of utilitarianism, taught that "the end justifies the
means" so that, depending on the end (such as the "greatest happiness
of the greatest number"), even the torture of children, or genocide
could
be seen as morally good. This naturalistic ethic was intertwined with
Darwinism
and its scientific offspring, eugenics and social Darwinism.
In Wells's cheery
secular
forecast, race war replaces the biblical vision of Armageddon. This
time,
however, the battle is not between good and evil, God and Satan, but
between
the weak and the strong, the unfit and the fit. The inferior forces of
degeneration had to be conquered by the progressive powers of the
racially
superior.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQUE2qAH6gw
Huxley: multiple utopian ideals for
totalitarian social
harmony
Eugenics
Conditioning
Fordism
Happy
altered states
Social harmony, security, perhaps
happiness – or
uncertainty, freedom and democracy?
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