Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?
7:00 A.M.
Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?
By Sarah Jones
Once narrowly defined as the belief that human beings could breed selectively to weed out disease and crime, eugenics no longer forms the basis of laws permitting the forcible sterilization of the poor. But as 2019 mercifully ends, eugenics is having a moment. Bret Stephens is only one symptom. In a piece touting the genius of Ashkenazi Jews, the New York Times columnist cited a study co-authored by the late white supremacist anthropologist, Henry Harpending, who promoted pseudoscientific ideas about the heritability of intelligence. The Times later retracted the reference, and attached an editor’s note to the column — not the first major correction they’ve attached to Stephens’s work, and at this rate, not the last.
Only Stephens knows for certain how he came to cite a white supremacist in his work. One increasingly plausible theory suggests that he spends approximately three seconds on Google to research his articles. Looking up a study’s co-authors might have tacked on an extra minute or so to his workload, an intolerable effort. But no matter how it happened, the cumulative effect of Stephens’s argument, and his citation of Harpending, evoked the debunked ideas of the eugenics movement.
For his trouble, Stephens can only blame himself, or perhaps his editor. The general thrust of his piece — arguing that one ethnic group is uniquely accomplished in comparison to others, and advancing a reason for it — clearly merited extra caution, though the columnist and his editor apparently disagreed. Older comments about Palestinians also weaken his claim to any benefit of the doubt. He once called anti-Semitism “a disease of the Arab mind,” and separately compared Palestinians to a “four-million-year-old mosquito” in “ideological amber.” The idea that the “Arab mind” is prone to any specific pathology is not as distantly removed from the ideas of men like Henry Harpending as Stephens would surely like us all to think.
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Lehmann was, of course, completely wrong. Harpending believed that white Europeans had bred for superior traits, like high intelligence and improved work ethic. As for everyone else? “I’ve never seen anyone with a hobby in Africa. They’re different,” he said at a 2009 conference on “preserving Western civilization.” Harpending was as close to a textbook definition of “white supremacist” as a person can probably get. Though Lehmann later admitted that Harpending did “promote racist views,” a beat short of calling the anthropologist a racist or white supremacist, she also doubled down on her defense of Stephens. Liberals are the real eugenicists, she’s implied over and over, an argument first devised by the anti-abortion movement some decades ago.
More:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/eugenic-ideas-never-really-went-away.html
