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This article is not the worst thing I've ever read on the subject, but it's frustrating how readily people go to the strawmen/weakmen/worst-case-scenario in these discussions.
If you don't personally think of native intelligence as high-status, then you aren't going to much care if (say) Asians are more likely to have it than Native Americans. In fact many people throughout history have treated native intelligence as either neutral or low-status; in some circumstances it might be bad to be smart (recall the manioc example from The Secret of Our Success). Because the "Information Age" has imbued nerds with social cachet they haven't always enjoyed, this is less often the case today than it has been in the past.
Progressives are (like most Westerners) far too quick to run to the Nazi analogy, but their underlying concerns are more, I think, a combination of their own eugenic instincts and their concern that social programs not be dismantled. Because progressives tend to think of intelligence as high-status, they also think of it as the sort of thing that should be distributed "fairly" (i.e., as equally as possible, whatever that means). But because progressives also tend to think we should "follow the science," specifically through government intervention in the human condition, they tend to jump immediately from facts to action plans. Tell a progressive that you've developed a low-cost, low-energy, non-polluting technology that turns dirty water into clean water, and they're immediately wondering how that technology can be deployed to benefit of humanity. Tell a progressive that you've found the genetic cause of a particular disease, and they're immediately wondering how we can turn that discovery into a treatment. The progressive mindset is fundamentally one of engineering the human condition.
To a deeply conservative mind, the proposition that "some people are stupid, it runs in families just like eye, hair, and skin color" is not only so blindingly obvious that researching it seems like a huge waste of time money, but also just a fact of life from which no particular conclusions need be drawn. Oh, sure, maybe you have second thoughts about marrying the handsome boy when you realize he's kind of dull; you think "do I really want to have this guy's dull children?" But this is not substantially more eugenic than secretly hoping that your children get your wife's red hair.
But the deeply conservative mind is living in the human world, not attempting to renovate it. So when a progressive is presented with mountains of meticulously-assembled peer-reviewed evidence that (1) IQ is substantially predictable along the lines of racial heritage and (2) IQ substantially influences the quality of a community's culture and economy, they don't just shrug their shoulders like a conservative. They start to wonder--how can we use this information to engineer the human condition? And the human mind, in its wonderfully inventive way, starts making suggestions: sterilize the idiots! Increase high-intelligence immigration from other nations! Uh... date white men and Asian women, perhaps?
In this way, progressive opposition to the very expression of the data on these matters is a kind of "telling on themselves," so to speak. It's not that they think the only logical thing to do would be to murder anyone with a low-IQ; it's that even a cursory grasp of HBD painfully illustrates the incredible shortcomings of progressivism as an ideology. If it turns out that your life is good, not because of anything the government has done for you, but because you live among the right sort of people, then huge swathes of social policy are just pointless and wasteful expenditures, fruitless attempts to engineer the human condition that can never, ever succeed until we literally engineer the humans themselves. This is incompatible with Western liberalism, and further exposes the daylight between "liberal" and "progressive." It threatens to unravel such entrenched political interests that the only possible response from the ingroup is to taboo the subject entirely.
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
They don't, though. Or rather, they do in cases where society has attached the word "eugenics" to a particular activity, but primarily a matter of social signaling. I cannot think of a more obviously eugenic practice than elective abortion; "the time is not right to have a child" or "this child is genetically defective and so I will terminate the pregnancy" is an extremely eugenic decision, and of course abortion is a keystone of American leftist politics. Virtually every human I know is at least weakly, and often strongly, eugenic in every way that makes any practical difference. Progressives have always loved eugenics, and still do; they just hate the word and its historical associations.
In particular, a progressive is far more likely to abort a Down syndrome baby than a conservative. In some especially progressive parts of the world, Down syndrome has essentially been eliminated via elective abortion. I admit that I regard most cries of "ableism" as fundamentally unserious for this and other reasons (like the progressive advocacy of assisted suicide for non-terminal and/or psychiatric maladies). You have to separate the signaling from the substance, though.
Even if, say, their children turn out to cause a crime wave? Surely that can't be right. Anyway you're not entirely mistaken, but the case is essentially overdetermined here.
Sure, but it's important to notice the difference between tabooing a word and certain specific historical examples, and actually disavowing a concept. Eugenics remains a fundamentally progressive idea; progressives just stopped calling it that. This is a very common approach to progressivism, shedding unpopular names for things while keeping their practical substance intact (see e.g. "cultural Marxism").
I think you’re totally misunderstanding the motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion.
Eugenics requires perceiving oneself and one’s progeny as part of a larger biological project - as merely one tiny branch of the human genetic/ancestral tree, the long-term health of which requires careful and intentional cultivation. Eugenics is a fundamentally communitarian endeavor. It’s about wanting humanity as a whole to be improved, using individual instantiations of eugenic breeding/sorting to direct the overall genetic health of the population in the direction of iterated improvement.
A middle-class American progressive woman who aborts a fetus with Down Syndrome is not thinking like this at all. Her decision could be framed in two ways: one is as a purely selfish decision - “If I have to raise a massively burdensome and defective child for the rest of my life, it will be financially catastrophic, require massive amounts of resources and effort, and will substantially decrease my quality of life.”; the other is to see it as an act of mercy for that child - “It would be better not to be born at all, than to be born as an incurably defective and mentally/physically retarded person, incapable of independence and entirely dependent on the indulgence of others for my entire life.”
Neither of these require, or in fact in any way involve, any orientation toward how your decision to abort a child ties into the larger genetic health of other future humans. Many of these women are some of the smartest and most capable individuals in our society; if they were primarily motivated by eugenic thinking, why on earth would they be deciding against perpetuating their superior genetic stock just because “it’s not the right time for me personally”? Abortion is clearly the dysgenic course of action in that case, barring fetal abnormalities.
The motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion was not the point, there. The point was that progressives do not oppose eugenics per se; practices of a eugenic character are in no need of special particular motivational states in order to be eugenic practices.
So, yes, if we're talking on a personal level about individual motivations, the science of "improving stock" (as Galton put it) is something individuals are not necessarily thinking about when they make decisions of a eugenic nature. But this was a discussion about policy, and I was responding to someone else who suggested that progressives oppose eugenics, which is simply not true. Progressives are fine with a wide array of eugenic practices, so long as people don't talk about the eugenic character of those practices (especially, while using the word "eugenics").
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This still qualifies as eugenics. Eugenics doesn't have to be about "humanity as a whole". You can think about eugenics on the level of a single person.
But how is this eugenics specifically? Yes, Down Syndrome in particular is a genetic condition, but what about aborting a fetus with any other sort of detectable congenital condition, i.e. hydrocephaly, missing limbs, etc.? I think that these are all motivated fundamentally on a recognition that some people’s lives are doomed from the very start to be unpleasant, short, or burdensome, and that if one had the ability to spare such people a life of suffering and extreme adversity, it is morally correct, or at least permissible, to do so. I think it’s coming from a totally different perspective than progressive eugenics proper.
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