10 Books that Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker

Author:Benjamin Wiker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brisance Books Group LLC
Published: 2010-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

There you have it. A cold shudder indeed. Think of it, the future landscape with nothing but unaspiring Irishmen multiplying off into the horizon, while the Great Scot sits sternly on his island of morality, its shores ever receding under the encroaching squalid tide.

Speaking of feeble-mindedness, Darwin viewed mental retardation as a sign of his theory’s truth: it represented an atavistic eruption, a sudden instance of our ape ancestors peeking through to remind us of our humble origins. “The simple brain of a microcephalous idiot, in as far as it resembles that of an ape, may in this sense be said to offer a case of reversion.”9 So, the small-brained were evolutionary backsliders. And Darwin noted, in this regard, that the “skull in Europeans is 92.3 cubic inches,” whereas those of the racial lowbrows, the “Asiatics” and “Australians,” were only 87.1 and 81.9 cubic inches respectively. Of course, in “Americans” the “mean internal capacity of the skull” was only 87.5.10

Sanger was obviously a good Darwinian, putting all this together in a nice eugenic package. Instead of focusing on race, however, she (both following and leading other eugenicists of her day) emphasized relative intelligence. That makes the problem of immorality, of evil, very simple. Evil is not caused by sin. There is no such thing as an evil genius. The original sin that causes all our ills, passed from generation to overabundant generation, is low IQ. In order to fix once and for all the nasty ills that have beset every society—but especially societies that allow the feebleminded to breed indiscriminately—we need only to stop the stupid from breeding.

But lest she be misunderstood, Sanger’s fundamental problem with feeblemindedness was not that those affected are the cause of every possible evil and crime. The “menace of feeble-mindedness to the race” is that they exist at all. She admits the existence of the “so-called ‘good feeble-minded,’” who could be “fostered in a ‘suitable environment,’” and so be made into a “docile, tractable, and peaceable element of the community.” But she will brook no starry-eyed sentimentalism:In such a reckless and thoughtless differentiation between the “bad” and the “good” feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the eugenicists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object because both are burdens and dangers to the intelligence of the community. As a matter of fact, there is sufficient evidence to lead us to believe that the so-called “borderline cases” are a greater menace than the out-and-out “defective delinquents” who can be supervised, controlled and prevented from procreating their kind. The advent of the Binet-Simon [IQ test] and similar psychological tests indicates that the mental defective who is glib and plausible, bright looking and attractive, but with a mental vision of seven, eight or nine years, may not merely lower the whole level of intelligence

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