Previously, I dismissed the possibility of leftist Eugenics but having just read the retard hating philosopher Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left I am having second thoughts.
Singer writes that the failures of the left are due in part to their ambivalence towards Darwin and this ambivalence was present from the beginning. For example, the Marxist approved of the anti-clerical implication of the theory of evolution but insisted that it was no longer relevant for discussions of human nature. Singer writes,
Singer suggests that the Left leverage human altruism to create a better world. Then he gets a little weird:Plekhanov, the leading nineteenth-century Russian Marxist, followed Engels in holding that 'Marx's inquiry begins precisely where Darwin's inquiry ends' and this became the conventional wisdom of Marxism. Lenin said that 'the transfer of biological concepts into the field of social science is a meaningless phrase." As late as the 1960s, school children in the Soviet Union were still taught the simple slogan: 'Darwinism is the science of biological evolution, Marxism of social evolution.'...It is intriguing how two very different ideologies - Christianity and Marxism - agreed with each other in insisting on a gulf between humans and animals, and therefore that evolutionary theory cannot be applied to human beings.
We are the first generation to understand not only that we have evolved, but also the mechanisms by which we have evolved...Hegel portrayed the culmination of history as state of Absolute Knowledge, in which Mind knows itself for what it is, and hence achieves its own freedom. We don't have to buy Hegel's metaphysics to see that something similar really has happened in the last fifty years...to those who fear the adding to the power of government and the scientific establishment, this seems more of a danger than a source of freedom. In a more distant future that we can still barely glimpse, it may be turn out to be the prerequisite for a new kind of freedom.So we have Hegel and more power to government to achieve true freedom. What could go wrong?
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"Political philosophers and the revolutionaries or reformers who have followed them have all too often worked out their ideal society, or their reforms, and sought to apply them without knowing much about the human beings who must carry out, and live with, their plans. Then when the plans don't work, they blame traitors within their ranks, or sinister agents of outside forces, for failure. Instead, those seeking to reshape society must understand the tendencies inherent in human beings, and modify their abstract ideals in order to suit them." from A Darwinian Left
Levi,
Fair point, but is this a criticism of the means the left used in the past or their ends?
From the last paragraph:
"No less a champion of Darwinian thought than Richard Dawkins holds out the prospect of 'deliberately cultivating pure, disinterested altruism-something that has no place in nature'..."
It is well known that more intelligent people come the optimal strategy (cooperation) in repeated plays of the prisoner's dilemma. Suppose you knew for genes for intelligence, in the name of disinterested altruism is it ethical for the state to try to add these to the gene pool?
Progressives and socialists used to flirt with eugenics. Karl Pearson's socialist views would be well received by many modern day socialists, apart from the eugenics. The left is protean and opportunistic. The left will almost certainly espouse radically different ideas to those espoused today, so I wouldn't rule out eugenics. If they were the rational, utilitarian universalists they claim to be, then some sort of global policy of colonialism and eugenics would be part of their program. People are rarely willing to carry utilitarianism to its logical conclusion, though.
I hope not. When the left takes HBD seriously they will be really dangerous. When David Brooks starts writing favorably about Kevin Beaver's research I am digging a bunker in Idaho.
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