#Eugenics

[blackbrownfamily]

[acti-veg]

please can I ask why you are anti eugenics?

as in, why would altering someone’s genes so they don’t have a disposition to develop cancer be bad?

as someone who is pretty sure their genes are responsible for their horrible mental health, if the genes responsible for my disposition towards ocd and depression could have been removed, I don’t see why that would have been bad

wouldn’t it be good if we could alter people’s genes so no one is violent and everyone has a kind & loving nature

I don’t see how that’s a bad thing

I can see how eugenics could potentially be harmful too but I don’t think any of the above would be bad

(just to be very clear, i am NOT advocating for anything horrible like “euthanising the disabled”)

Eugenics is not just gene editing, it is a set of deeply racist, ableist beliefs about human ‘improvement’ on the basis of so-called ‘desirable racial characteristics.’ Eugenics as a concept is inherently wrapped up in white supremacy, homophobia and ableism. It was extremely popular in the west as an idea, it took the Nazis putting it into practice to show us what eugenics in practice actually looks like.

Gene editing sounds good on the basis of curing or preventing human disease, but that is precisely how all controversial science is framed. It is hard to object to editing genes to prevent cancer, but what happens when we start selecting for other traits we deem to be ‘desirable,’ and who gets to decide? The state? Medical professionals? The industrial military complex? Scientists? All of whom have the same biases we all have from being socialised in a deeply prejudiced society?

You say you don’t support anything horrible, but we don’t all agree on what is horrible - what should be kept and what should be lost. Many hearing people would see deafness as uncomplicatedly a medical issue, and assume all deaf people would want a cure. But Deaf culture is vibrant, and many in the community don’t see themselves as in any way needing to be ‘cured.’ Imagine the possibility that someone could edit the potential for anyone else to be part of your group out of the human genome entirely, that we could potentially see cultural genocide of Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent communities done on a systematic scale.

Take depression as an example. Taking away any genetic disposition towards depression is tempting, but then what is to stop us from expanding this same line of reasoning to genetically select for positive dispositions? Is that actually desirable? Taking away the propensity for a natural range of emotions? What would be the an actual impact of that human society? Could we end up ‘curing’ the symptom of a sick society by just editing out the resulting depression, rather than addressing what is actually causing the mental health crisis, beyond just genetics? Could we end up in the dystopia that Huxley envisioned in a Brave New World, but with gene editing instead of soma?

You mention violence, but violence is an evolved response to stressors that is sometimes necessary. I shouldn’t have to spell out why genetically editing a population to be non-violent and good humoured regardless of what is being done to them is bad, and what you’re essentially saying here isn’t very far away from ‘why can’t we edit everyone to be the perfect, passive citizen and consumer?’ Fight or flight is part of our very being, and aggression when it is called for in defence of our loved ones or our own interests is a part of the human condition. Do we really want to lose that? Do we want to cull the propensity for violent resistance from our DNA?

It doesn’t stop at physical traits and overtly negative dispositions, either. We have been able to genetically engineer voles to be monogomous. That is not a joke. Can you imagine what the implications could be for being able to select for behaviours and desires? The state being able to mandate gene editing to avoid disease, slowly turning into gene editing for ‘super soldiers’, then to select for desirable traits in their citizens? Even if democracies wouldn’t do it, history tells us that if the technology is there, someone will.

Before it even gets to the human stages though, animals will bear the brunt of our curiosity. In the famous case of Alba, we created a glowing rabbit for the sake of an ‘art’ project. We have grown an ear on the back of a mouse. We have already selectively bred farmed animals to the point where they suffer constantly, imagine just how horrific it could get if we can edit their genetic sequence cheaply and at scale? Imagine what we would do to them?

These technologies being developed under capitalism brings up even more issues. The wealthy classes have always argued that they are somehow superior, better ‘breeding,’ more intelligent, less lazy. They’ve always been kidding themselves, but genetic editing available only to those who can afford it would make them right. At least initially this technology would be wildly expensive, and before those prices were bought down we’d likely end up with a society that is biologically hierarchical as well as economically and socially. Capitalists would very likely fight to keep it that way, just as they fight to keep themselves economically superior now.

This isn’t just a class issue either, the chances that this technology would be offered to the global population and not just rich western nations are minimal. Environmental racism and cultural ideals could become genetically baked in. We wouldn’t be improving the human race, we’d be ‘improving’ very narrow sections of it, according to a narrow and context dependent definition of what a ‘good’ human looks like. Wealth and social hierarchy could become biologically embedded, with only rich westerners benefiting from these advances. I mean, people in the global south are still dying of malaria, despite us wiping it out in the west in 1950s.

You may dismiss some of this as alarmism, but I think people who are not at least a little bit concerned at these possibilities haven’t thought about the implications of gene editing very much. We’re essentially in the cusp of creating an entirely new species, without really considering what that means. If history tells us anything, it’s that we’re likely to leap into the technology for commercial reasons long before we’ve given proper consideration to the ethical and social implications. That should worry you.

[librarycards]

Hi! I have a question for you if that's ok. You mentioned hating places that focus on iq and I agree that iq how it is measured and thought of is incredibly flawed. But I also know that there's research that supports that the brains of so called "gifted" people work differently, and have much in common with ADHD and autism. What's your stance on that?

I personally think that "gifted" (hate that term) brains work differently and are neurodivergent but I don't think iq is an at all adequate way of measuring that. From my experience and what I've read "gifted" people are often also highly sensitive, can have difficulty finding social acceptance, have a very developed sense of justice, and have trouble functioning in the world. There's also a lot of overlap between people who are "gifted" and those who have ADHD and/or autism.

giftedness is a social construction tied, you're right, to constructions of a certain kind of 'high functioning" neurodivergent person. as someone marked as gifted and certainly framed as "highly sensitive" as a child, who received an autism diagnosis in adulthood (and should have as a child but did not due mostly to psychiatric misogyny) I'm familiar with this line of thinking.

i disagree with it. what value is there in reifying some kind of binary between the "non-gifted" and "gifted" brains, or the racist and anti-poor metric of "IQ," which is better described as a measure of certain types of reasoning and problem solving than of something as nebulous as "general intelligence"? it seems that the only value society would derive from some definite separation of different cognitive types would be to 1) better exploit them for profit and 2) better segregate the cognitive haves from the have-nots. see: special ed kids being relegated to futurelessness, whereas autistics who happen to be good at niche tasks gain conditional access to abled 'success' so long as they/we perform exceptionally.

i am not interested in the unique intricacies of my brain in comparison to some imagined non-gifted or non-autistic counterpart for the same reason i am not interested in finding imaginary genetic markers for "homosexuality" –– these ontological obsessions are actually very dark & sinister & eugenic at bottom, something you yourself refer to when you claim "autistic senses of justice" (as it were) are "very developed". (i won't go into an analysis of international development discourse in relation to individualized human development, but like....read about colonialism and so-called 'child races' ok?).

sure, i have difficulty functioning in a social world ableist by design, but this doesn't mean i am simply an alien who ought to be living in 3025. it means i share the responsibility of each person to use my unique gifts to improve the world as it is. that is how i want to think about the word "gifted." beyond functioning labels, iq, or these weird delineations between "smart kids and dumb kids". we all have gifts, abilities, and talents unique to us. we have the chance in our lives to learn to use them to build the world we want. but it's only by abolishing hierarchies of intelligence that we can each be the best versions of ourselves and show up for each other.

[staticespace]

[ID: A Twitter post by Hampton Institute @/HamptonThink:

Overpopulation is a Malthusian myth. There are 7.7 billion people. 95% of us occupy only 10% of the land. We produce enough food to satisfy 10 billion people & can double that, in a more sustainable way. We have a profit & distribution problem (capitalism), not a people problem.

End ID]

join the praxis discord - sign up - github

[anarchotahdigism]

I only saw the first 10 mins of the Lost pilot and the last 10 mins of the series finale & I'm considering putting on the show because I have no better ideas despite passionately hating the Lost fandom & knowing that I won't be a better person for subjecting myself to this but that's all media these days sure wish people masked & spoke COVID so i could leave isolation & exist beyond a screen

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

It feels odd that while Lovecraft's racism is often the first thing the mind jumps to when discussing him, the same isn't really true for other prominent pulp authors. Especially considering Edgar Rice Burroughs whole oeuvre is a celebration of white supremacy and eugenics. Tarzan boasts that he's a "killer of beasts and many black men." Utopias that have bred out crime through execution or sterilization of criminals' families are a repeated staple of his fiction. It wasn't just his fiction either; the man wrote a newspaper column calling for the killing of "moral imbeciles" and their families [source].

Its not like they were writing in wildly different times; the first Tarzan book came out only seven years before Lovecraft's Dagon. And they both were incredibly influential and celebrated figures in specific genre niches that still command wide attention. But while his racism isn't unknown, it doesn't seem to be attached to Burrough's public character in the same way it is for Lovecraft. Why doesn't he have multiple generations of pulp fans coming to terms with how the author they idolize is awful? Are there just not enough people reading A Princess of Mars these days?

[transsexualfiend]

Cripplepunk, madpunk, and neuropunk aren't just "I'm disabled and also left-leaning". It's a specific realm of activism rooted in dismantling the systems that put disabled, mad, sick, etc folks at a disadvantage in society. This mean not only being against the very systems that harm us but also understanding their colonial origins and continued racist legacies. (Anti-ableism, anti-sanism, anti-psych, etc). This means not only just identifying and finding pride in your disability but also building and constantly evolving your understanding of disability and diversity and learning how you can change your worldview to accurately highlight the struggles of disabled people. (EVEN if it sometimes means you will be uncomfortable or unsure of unlearning some kinds of hate.)

[theculturedmarxist]

In 2020, Robert Kuciemba, a woodworker in San Francisco was infected with covid by a co-worker after his Nevada-based Victory Woodworks transferred a number of sick workers to the San Francisco site for a few months. 

Through the proceedings of the case it turns out that the employer knew some employees might be sick but they transferred them anyway and ignored a San Francisco ordinance in place at the time to quarantine suspected covid cases.

Kuciemba was subsequently infected and he then infected his wife, who ended up in ICU on a ventilator.

The California Supreme Court just ruled against Kuciemba on the basis that a victory, while, in the court's words, "morally" the right thing to do, would create "dire financial consequences for employers" and cause a "dramatic expansion of liability" to stop the spread of covid.

There’s a few stunning details to note in this case. First, the court agreed that there is no doubt the company had ignored the San Francisco health ordinance. In other words, they accepted the company had broken the law. And then concluded “yeah, but, capitalism.”

Secondly, the case was so obviously important to the struggle between capitalism and mass infection that the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying organisation got involved and helped the company with its defence. Remember, this is a tiny company in a niche industry. The involvement of the biggest business lobbyists in the country tells us a lot about the importance of the principle they knew was at stake.

Thirdly, the defence of the company is very telling. They said “There is simply no limit to how wide the net will be cast: the wife who claims her husband caught COVID-19 from the supermarket checker, the husband who claims his wife caught it while visiting an elder care home." 

Well, exactly. Capitalism couldn’t survive if employers were liable for covid infections contracted in the workplace, and the ripple effect of those infections. And they know it. 

This case is something of a covid smoking gun, revealing what we always suspected but had never seen confirmed in so many words: the public health imperative of controlling a pandemic virus by making employers liable for some of that control is, and always must be, secondary to capitalist profit. 

This ruling is also saying out loud what has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last two years: employers don’t have a responsibility to keep your family safe from covid. You have that responsibility. And if you give a family member covid that you caught at work and they get sick or die – even if it was a result of law-breaking by your employer – that’s on you buddy.

It is the same old capitalist story: the shunting of responsibility for ills that should be shared across society, including employers in that society, onto individuals.

This ruling essentially helps codify workplace mass infection and justifies it as necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalism.

This is not new. This is where the ‘just a cold’ and the ‘mild' narrative came from. It came from doctors and healthcare experts whose first loyalty was to capitalism. Not to public health. To money, not to lives. Abetted by media who uncritically platformed them.

While this ruling tells us little that we couldn’t already see from the public policy approach of the last two years, it is revealing (and to some extent validating) to see it confirmed by the highest law of the land in the United States. 

[nightmaretour]

The UK officially passed the "assisted dying" bill... and with a healthcare system that actively WANTS to get rid of you one way or another, to the point of being one of its main motivations in choice of treatments (alongside cost)...

Well, I think we've figured out what Kier Starmer is planning to do with all of the disabled people who he can't force to work.

[riderofthemist]

Mx.Papaya : bit.ly/FreeResistArt

Instagram: @ AgitateAndEducate

Twitter: @ Bufanator

[whereserpentswalk]

Gentle reminder that you can be 100% pro choice and still understand that aborting a fetus because it will be disabled as a human is a eugenicist idea that comes from absolutely horrifying ideas that have been placed in western culture as a result of more overt eugenics movements in our past.

[odinsblog]

Donald Trump's nephew recounts a conversation with then-president Trump after 2020 White House meeting with disability advocates. (source)

[bugboy-behaviour]

EGYPT IS LEAVING A DISABLED MAN TO DIE IN GAZA, DESPITE HIM AND HIS FAMILY HAVING THE FUNDS TO ESCAPE

PLEASE, WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS!!!! SPREAD THIS WHEREVER YOU CAN!!!! PUT PRESSURE ON EGYPT TO PUT HIS NAME BACK ON THE LIST

[thebibliosphere]

Fully aware I’m bringing the straw discourse back myself but it’s almost like this is a systemic problem with how we manufacturer everything, including “eco-friendly” options.

Anyway, wishing all the ecowarrior girlies who told me and countless other disabled folks to our faces that if our disabilities meant we couldn’t give up plastic straws for safety reasons we were a burden on the planet and should consider suicide the moral option a very “suck on your toxic bullshit.”

Literally.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Marshmallow Longtermism

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this week!

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "Marshmallow Longtermism"; it's a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality:

https://locusmag.com/2024/09/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/

Conservatives often root our societal ills in a childish impatience, and cast themselves as wise adults who understand that "you can't get something for nothing." Think here of the memes about lazy kids who would rather spend on avocado toast and fancy third-wave coffee rather than paying off their student loans. In this framing, poverty is a consequence of immaturity. To be a functional adult is to be sober in all things: not only does a grownup limit their intoxicant intake to head off hangovers, they also go to the gym to prevent future health problems, they save their discretionary income to cover a down-payment and student loans.

This isn't asceticism, though: it's a mature decision to delay gratification. Avocado toast is a reward for a life well-lived: once you've paid off your mortgage and put your kid through college, then you can have that oat-milk latte. This is just "sound reasoning": every day you fail to pay off your student loan represents another day of compounding interest. Pay off the loan first, and you'll save many avo toasts' worth of interest and your net toast consumption can go way, way up.

Cleaving the world into the patient (the mature, the adult, the wise) and the impatient (the childish, the foolish, the feckless) does important political work. It transforms every societal ill into a personal failing: the prisoner in the dock who stole to survive can be recast as a deficient whose partying on study-nights led to their failure to achieve the grades needed for a merit scholarship, a first-class degree, and a high-paying job.

Dividing the human race into "the wise" and "the foolish" forms an ethical basis for hierarchy. If some of us are born (or raised) for wisdom, then naturally those people should be in charge. Moreover, putting the innately foolish in charge is a recipe for disaster. The political scientist Corey Robin identifies this as the unifying belief common to every kind of conservativism: that some are born to rule, others are born to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#healthy-populism

This is why conservatives are so affronted by affirmative action, whose premise is that the absence of minorities in the halls of power stems from systemic bias. For conservatives, the fact that people like themselves are running things is evidence of their own virtue and suitability for rule. In conservative canon, the act of shunting aside members of dominant groups to make space for members of disfavored minorities isn't justice, it's dangerous "virtue signaling" that puts the childish and unfit in positions of authority.

Again, this does important political work. If you are ideologically committed to deregulation, and then a giant, deregulated sea-freighter crashes into a bridge, you can avoid any discussion of re-regulating the industry by insisting that we are living in a corrupted age where the unfit are unjustly elevated to positions of authority. That bridge wasn't killed by deregulation – it's demise is the fault of the DEI hire who captained the ship:

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-dei-utah-lawmaker-phil-lyman-misinformation

The idea of a society made up of the patient and wise and the impatient and foolish is as old as Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper," but it acquired a sheen of scientific legitimacy in 1970, with Walter Mischel's legendary "Stanford Marshmallow Experiment":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

In this experiment, kids were left alone in a locked room with a single marshmallow, after being told that they would get two marshmallows in 15 minutes, but only if they waited until them to eat the marshmallow before them. Mischel followed these kids for decades, finding that the kids who delayed gratification and got that second marshmallow did better on every axis – educational attainment, employment, and income. Adult brain-scans of these subjects revealed structural differences between the patient and the impatient.

For many years, the Stanford Marshmallow experiment has been used to validate the cleavage of humanity in the patient and wise and impatient and foolish. Those brain scans were said to reveal the biological basis for thinking of humanity's innate rulers as a superior subspecies, hidden in plain sight, destined to rule.

Then came the "replication crisis," in which numerous bedrock psychological studies from the mid 20th century were re-run by scientists whose fresh vigor disproved and/or complicated the career-defining findings of the giants of behavioral "science." When researchers re-ran Mischel's tests, they discovered an important gloss to his findings. By questioning the kids who ate the marshmallows right away, rather than waiting to get two marshmallows, they discovered that these kids weren't impatient, they were rational.

The kids who ate the marshmallows were more likely to come from poorer households. These kids had repeatedly been disappointed by the adults in their lives, who routinely broke their promises to the kids. Sometimes, this was well-intentioned, as when an economically precarious parent promised a treat, only to come up short because of an unexpected bill. Sometimes, this was just callousness, as when teachers, social workers or other authority figures fobbed these kids off with promises they knew they couldn't keep.

The marshmallow-eating kids had rationally analyzed their previous experiences and were making a sound bet that a marshmallow on the plate now was worth more than a strange adult's promise of two marshmallows. The "patient" kids who waited for the second marshmallow weren't so much patient as they were trusting: they had grown up with parents who had the kind of financial cushion that let them follow through on their promises, and who had the kind of social power that convinced other adults – teachers, etc – to follow through on their promises to their kids.

Once you understand this, the lesson of the Marshmallow Experiment is inverted. The reason two marshmallow kids thrived is that they came from privileged backgrounds: their high grades were down to private tutors, not the choice to study rather than partying. Their plum jobs and high salaries came from university and family connections, not merit. Their brain differences were the result of a life free from the chronic, extreme stress that comes with poverty.

Post-replication crisis, the moral of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is that everyone experiences a mix of patience and impatience, but for the people born to privilege, the consequences of impatience are blunted and the rewards of patience are maximized.

Which explains a lot about how rich people actually behave. Take Charles Koch, who grew his father's coal empire a thousandfold by making long-term investments in automation. Koch is a vocal proponent of patience and long-term thinking, and is openly contemptuous of publicly traded companies because of the pressure from shareholders to give preference to short-term extraction over long-term planning. He's got a point.

Koch isn't just a fossil fuel baron, he's also a wildly successful ideologue. Koch is one of a handful of oligarchs who have transformed American politics by patiently investing in a kraken's worth of think tanks, universities, PACs, astroturf organizations, Star chambers and other world-girding tentacles. After decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, court-packing and propagandizing, the American billionaire class has seized control of the US and its institutions. Patience pays!

But Koch's longtermism is highly selective. Arguably, Charles Koch bears more personal responsibility for delaying action on the climate emergency than any other person, alive or dead. Addressing greenhouse gasses is the most grasshopper-and-the-ant-ass crisis of all. Every day we delayed doing something about this foreseeable, well-understood climate debt added sky-high compounding interest. In failing to act, we saved billions – but we stuck our future selves with trillions in debt for which no bankruptcy procedure exists.

By convincing us not to invest in retooling for renewables in order to make his billions, Koch was committing the sin of premature avocado toast, times a billion. His inability to defer gratification – which he imposed on the rest of us – means that we are likely to lose much of world's coastal cities (including the state of Florida), and will have to find trillions to cope with wildfires, zoonotic plagues, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

Koch isn't a serene Buddha whose ability to surf over his impetuous attachments qualifies him to make decisions for the rest of us. Rather, he – like everyone else – is a flawed vessel whose blind spots are just as stubborn as ours. But unlike a person whose lack of foresight leads to drug addiction and petty crimes to support their habit, Koch's flaws don't just hurt a few people, they hurt our entire species and the only planet that can support it.

The selective marshmallow patience of the rich creates problems beyond climate debt. Koch and his fellow oligarchs are, first and foremost, supporters of oligarchy, an intrinsically destabilizing political arrangement that actually threatens their fortunes. Policies that favor the wealthy are always seeking an equilibrium between instability and inequality: a rich person can either submit to having their money taxed away to build hospitals, roads and schools, or they can invest in building high walls and paying guards to keep the rest of us from building guillotines on their lawns.

Rich people gobble that marshmallow like there's no tomorrow (literally). They always overestimate how much bang they'll get for their guard-labor buck, and underestimate how determined the poors will get after watching their children die of starvation and preventable diseases.

All of us benefit from some kind of cushion from our bad judgment, but not too much. The problem isn't that wealthy people get to make a few poor choices without suffering brutal consequences – it's that they hoard this benefit. Most of us are one missed student debt payment away from penalties and interest that add twenty years to our loan, while Charles Koch can set the planet on fire and continue to act as though he was born with the special judgment that means he knows what's best for us.

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight

Image: Mark S (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/markoz46/4864682934/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/