I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions.
In particular, I focused on someone named R.B. Kerr, who had at least a 25 year history of writing letters and articles for eugenics journals, and was also much concerned with the sexual habits of women. The earliest articles describe him as Canadian, but later he seems to have moved to Croydon; nowhere can I find any mention of his credentials or background, although I did find one picture of him circa 1907. He seems to have gradually evolved from a radical advocate of Free Love into a kind of Colonel Blimp character.
Here’s R.B. Kerr in a letter to the Eugenics Review in 1933. He’s not a racist or anti-Semite, oh, no — he’s just defending Hitler.
SIR,—I entirely agree with you in condemning Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, but the reason you give seems to me fallacious. In your July issue you say:
“Herr Hitler has still not realized, apparently, that in declaring that the small number of Jews in Germany have achieved an altogether disproportionate measure of success—in the arts, sciences, and learned professions…he has publicly acknowledged their superiority to the bulk of the nation that wishes to get rid of them!”
If you will read Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, you will find that he fully understands your argument, but does not agree with it. One of his principal charges against the Jews is that in literature and the arts they succeed by superficial and meretricious qualities, and not by first-rate work.
The distinction is familiar to every competent critic. Everybody knows the difference between a best-seller and a literary masterpiece. Edgar Wallace sold far better than John Galsworthy. Hall Caine left many times as much money as Thomas Hardy. Martin Tupper was beyond comparison a more successful poet than Robert Browning.
The same thing is true of all the arts. The greatest musical composers were pure Germans, but the works of the Jew Mendelssohn have sold far better than those of Bach and Beethoven. The greatest painters are hardly ever the most popular. I cannot speak with authority about science, but I have heard such contempt for scientific knights and newspaper scientists, that I strongly suspect that the same principle applies.
I do not know whether Hitler is correct in his remarks about the Jews. He does, however, make a distinction between value and success which would have the unanimous support of intelligent critics.
R.B. Kerr
335 Sydenham Road,
Croydon
“Everybody knows the difference between a best-seller and a literary masterpiece”! Then tell me how, please. It seems to me one easy signifier is whether the author is a Jew or not. I also have to appreciate the implication that Mendelssohn was not a pure German, despite having been born in Hamburg, to a family that converted to Christianity. Having Richard Wagner despise you must be what kicks you out of the Pure German clan.
But I am fascinated by how what starts as a sort of academic and abstract correction of an error interpreting a Nazi book gradually evolves into a full-on endorsement of racist stereotypes. No, Hitler shouldn’t persecute the Jews, but by the way, aren’t they superficial and meretricious?
In the early decade of the twentieth century, his perspective was more on sex. If you browse the American Journal of Eugenics from 1907 (it’s been scanned by Google and at least the first three volumes are freely available), his name crops up multiple times. He also gets mentioned in a much later book, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality as a standout contributor.
Brace yourself, ladies, R.B. Kerr has identified an obligation for you.
…contributions from an articulate, well-read Canadian sex radical name R.B. Kerr triggered rancorous debate among Lucifer [a journal that would later be renamed the American Journal of Eugenics –pzm] readers, their words demonstrating wide differences about the matter of eugenics. Favoring nature over nurture, Kerr argued that only careful breeding would enable men and women to improve “the mental and moral, as well as the physical” makeup of their offspring. He further argued that this laudable end could not be achieved unless women devoted their energies and focused their attention on the production of human beings and deferred their fight for personal liberty to a later day. But what most infuriated longtime sex radical women was his condemnation of monogamy as “the absolute negation of all scientific breeding.” “No breeder of dogs, horses, cattle, sheep or any other kind,” Kerr asserted, “would ever dream of breeding on monogamous principles.” Thus justifying sexual variety on scientific grounds, he suggested that only unenlightened women would be “so unfortunately constituted as to feel a repugnance to intercourse with every man capable of making a good father.”
Charming, isn’t he? But I have to give the prize for clueless chauvinism to Moses Harman. Also note that there’s a difference in how men and women respond to Kerr’s advocacy.
Male correspondents praised Kerr as one of Lucifer‘s “wisest, most logical, and clearest-headed” writers. Moses Harman put himself “on record” as “an advocate of breeding prize animals…whether quadrupeds or bipeds.” It was well and good “to make each woman free to do what she pleases with her own person,” he conceded, but a man had a responsibility “to educate her in the wise choice of a father for her child.”
…
But female contributors who for decades had advocated the sexual emancipation of women responded in Lucifer‘s pages with numerous objections to Kerr’s ideas.
This is terrible. As archiving sources make more and more older texts available for easy access on the web, I’m mainly learning that nothing has changed, and humanity has always been awful. And eugenics? Good god, what a horror.
I know that name! Hall Caine was the Hommy-beg to whom Bram Stoker dedicated Dracula.
Well, if the best-seller’s Fifty Shades of Dreck, the other’s almost bound to be a literary masterpiece by comparison …
As to his notions of women being obliged to breed with whatever “suitable” blokes there were, looks like we know where Dr Strangelove got his ideas from.
It is fascinating to note that R B Kerr doesn’t seem to have known Beethoven was a person of mixed race and also that he lived above a shop at the crumbly end of Sydenham Road (some of it is quite posh) which is now a Chinese cafe and noodle bar – http://goo.gl/maps/phES2
A classic troll, perhaps?
Exactly. There Has Never Been A Golden Age. Anyone looking fondly back at the past is missing the awfulness that was there.
It’s jarring, looking back, to see how open and unapologetic eugenicists were in the early 20th century. It was seen by many across the political spectrum as an intellectually respectable position. And it wasn’t an exclusively male preserve: both Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, pioneers of birth control and women’s rights, promoted eugenic ideas. Now, someone who argues for eugenic policies will be widely regarded as an awful person, but back then, it was polite dinner table conversation, as well as actual government policy in many countries (look at the history of forced sterilisation programmes, for example). So… progress?
Funny that I’ve never heard (of) any eugenicist advocating what any actual breeder of animals knows – that it is the “mixed bloods”, the hybrids, the mutts, who excel in overall health and intelligence. As generalists par exellence, humanity would therefor derive greatest benefit from eschewing any traditional social customs/taboos against to such artificial constructs as “intermarriage”.
There was no Golden Age just gilded memories.
A certain irony in comparing Mendelssohn to Bach, since modern appreciation of Bach really begins with Mendelssohn
Moggie @ 4
Forced sterilization is not a thing of the past, unfortunately: Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals, The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Google maps seems to show a very ordinary house at this address, admittedly across from a park. Do you have local knowledge, Maureen?
Btw, where does the idea come from that Beethoven was mixed race? I’m sure that the Nazis would have checked his background thoroughly before approving of him.
Progress! And all it took was a gigantic war and the genocide of 12 million people!
Just goes to show that “I’m not a racist but” is as old as racism itself.
I do know the area slightly, cnocspeireag. The western end of Sydeham Road has smart shops and is in an upmarket, expensive suburb with its own railway station. The area around the shops is full of large and very expensive late Victorian houses, this sort of thing – http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/34634690#HoAwpqboIV6MQSGm.97 – while the eastern end is smaller houses and shops with a huge traffic roundabout and a lot of industrial premises.
The attraction of the Sydenham suburb, as it was being built, was that it was on a hill with fresh air and views, while 335 is down hill from there and thus down market! Also at the up-hill end are the Horniman Museum and gardens, the golf club and Crystal Palace park!
I’ve been there many a time but I couldn’t afford to live there!
Sorry, forgot to link this – http://open.salon.com/blog/ronp01/2009/09/27/the_african_heritage_of_ludwig_van_beethoven
Remember, the blackness of Black people, like the very existence of women doing anything original, tends to be written out of history at the earliest possible moment so google will give you a million links denying this!
Well, it’s probably because Eugenics is more of a guy thing and lacks the estrogene vibe…
+++
His views on art are echoing the Nazis’ ideas of “entartete Kunst”, perverted art: that the old masters are great but obviously that moderns stuff is clearly a product of depravity and insanity.
It would be interesting to know how the likes of Kerr and Harman would have rated their own procreational ‘value’. I have a sneaking suspicion that – if they had had the internet in those days – these two would have been just two more dudes whining that women don’t give them enough sex, even though they are obviously outstanding breeding material and thus entitled to unrestricted access to female genitalia…
It really is sad that eugenics was such a popular movement, using shitty and illogical interpretations of good science, with a dash of outright pseudoscience, and even getting decent scientists in their ranks aside from the odious fuckwads like those quoted above. In addition to all of the above: Their attitudes towards people with disabilities were, of course, horrible. They thought criminality was a heritable, Mendelian trait that they wanted to eradicate. And they also thought poverty was also genetic-like, and liked to associate it with mental disability and criminal behavior.
Bunch of rich, privileged white guys who are convinced of their own Super Inteligence, using (shit) Logic and (poorly understood) Science in order to degrade and control women, minorities, poor people, and disabled people? Unprecedented, I know!
Women treated as nothing more than human incubators. ::Spits::
@ cnocspeireag
Some of Beethoven’s ancestors were Dutch, not German, and he was from relatively low-class family. Claims that he had other racial backgrounds (to a greater extent than other Europeans of the time) are somewhat dubious but he was nowhere near the pure/ideal German that eugenicists imagined him to be.
It’s also interesting that while he was an friendly and poorly-adjusted person in his personal life, some of his works have humanist and feminist undertones. (Particularly the opera, Fidelio)
So…these guys were the incipient ‘incels’ of their time? I could see that.
What’s class got to do with it, nrdo? Queen Elizabeth herself has two female ancestors of part-African heritage – Philippa of Hainault and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen to George III.
And then there’s the Prophet Mohammed who appears in 5 or is it 6 of her lines of descent.
Robert Bird Kerr:
http://wyatt.elasticbeanstalk.com/mep/MS/xml/bkerrr.html
What the history teaches us, unfortunately, is that while individually we may learn and be shocked and even try to apply what we come to understand, collectively our society does not. Eugenics is strongly entrenched even now, as an attitude, while the distinction between government mandates (the Nazi approach but — as sterilization rather than murder — also that of California and Buck v. Bell) and individual choice is extremely blurry. “Better baby” competitions are out of fashion, but trait selection is regularly discussed and intermittently pushed as a commercial enterprise. The roots are not far away. Indeed, Robert Edwards, the Nobel Prizewinning “father of IVF” was an active member of both the British Eugenics Society and its successor the Galton Institute. Did he do good? Yes. So did Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and all the others. People: Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
The myth of a racially segregated Europe is really important to a lot of people. That’s how we get the Vikings, one of the most open-minded people in the world, with descendants everywhere from America to the Middle East, being hailed as paragons of Scandinavian purity.
“Eugenics” can mean many things. The idea had been around for millennia (e.g., Sparta) when Galton gave it a new name and attempted scientific rationale, and even then focused on trying to “improve” the “best”.
The nasty part came along when doctors figured out cheap & easy sterilization of women and emphasis shifted to eliminating “undesirables”; the pseudosciences of racialism put the whole nasty project on a wholesale level. Margaret Sanger, e.g., tried to move the focus to the qualities of individuals rather than races or classes, but the tide went against her.
We have a benign restart of eugenics going these days under the name of “genetic counseling” – those with certain hereditary (proneness to) health problems are advised not to make babies with those similarly afflicted. Likewise, people intending to become parents who select their partners with an eye to producing healthy offspring are practicing retail eugenics of a sort, the aspect of mating identified by Darwin as “sexual selection”.
@ Maureen Brian
I think class is important because eugenicists weren’t just racist and sexist, they thought that the biological inferiority of the lower classes explained (and justified) why they were poor. I don’t think we can or need to say anything conclusive about Beethoven’s family history except “who cares?”
I do agree that it’s unfortunate that the creative endeavors of non white males were erased and beaten down. We’ll never know what composers like Fanny Mendelssohn and Louise Farrenc would have written if they had the opportunities that their male contemporaries got by default.
This one is interesting, the equivalent of thinking any woman in the bar who doesn’t succumb to your crude advances is a lesbian. She views the idea of sex with me with repugnance? She must be unenlightened. What other explanation is there?
True, but that doesn’t tell you much about a specific individual. The article you link to is pretty weak: it starts with a claim that Beethoven’s mother was a “Moor” (according to Wikipedia, she was Maria Magdalena Keverich, daughter of Johann Heinrich Keverich, who had been the head chef at the court of the Archbishopric of Trier, which doesn’t sound particularly Moorish), but then refers to the Flemish origin of his father’s family, the Spanish occupation of Flanders, and the Moorish conquest of Spain in an attempt to find some (relatively) recent African ancestry. It also claims “his music reveals a cultural connection to his African ancestry… The distinctive characteristic of off-beat accents, or syncopation, is intrinsic and integral to Black people’s music making”. Srsly? There’s a gene for syncopation, specific to Africans? Maybe a strong case can be made for Beethoven’s recent African ancestry, but if so, I’ve yet to see it.
That is not eugenics. Eugenics was/is aimed at the long-term “health of the race”; genetic counseling at the health of (prospective) individuals. In fact, counseling people with known deleterious recessive alleles not to have children with each other will if anything tend to increase the prevalence of such alleles in the population.
Unrelated point: that a considerable number of prominent leftists supported eugenics (H.G. Wells, who later recanted, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb) and that Social Democratic Sweden was an enthusiastic steriliser of “defective” women, should never be forgotten by those of us on the left.
Canada also has a long and sordid history with forced sterilisation, particularly of the intellectually/socially challenged parts of the population, both racist and ablist in nature.
The sentiment that these people put out is essentially “You are not a person to me. You are a tool for my use and satisfaction. If you are not useful you are a threat, to my resource collection if nothing else “. A sentiment that extends to anyone that is not in whatever they define as “their group”. The despicable excuses that get used to reinforce this kind of crap are amazing. I see echos of using musical tastes to try to disparage and dehumanize Jews in the way some people use “black culture” or similar to try to do the same to blacks. The more things change…
Another interesting thing. I’m a person that appeals to the common good on a regular basis, but this provides a good example that just saying that you want something because of the common good is meaningless on it’s own. Women should be tools for the sexual satisfaction of others for the common good? Nauseating. I see the same attitudes in commentators in articles such as this one Ophelia posted.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/09/online_misogyny_of_the_fappening_stealing_celebrity_photos_is_not_just_human.html?wpisrc=lf&hubRefSrc=permalink#lf-content=95430492:218445369
The phrasing is really ugly. For some people it’s all about solving the “getting men the sex they want” problem. I really hate my species sometimes.
Kerr in his letter says:
He says things like that and yet he writes about Eugenics?!
It never is. Repeat for every single individual.
Only if you don’t count the good of women.
Would you add Margaret Sanger alongside Kerr?
“We should apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring”
@Nick Gotts
Also, apparently, “He was the first composer to invigorate European Classical Music with prodigious use of this decidedly inherent African rhythmic trait.”
To which I’m forced to say: Bullshit. Syncopated rhythms have been present in European music since at least the 14th century. That Salon piece reeks of trying to fit a pet theory to the facts, whether they like it or not.
Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality is still in print.
Robert Bird Kerr was a Fabian socialist, an attorney out of Scotland with an MFA (credential given on his book on overpopulation in Great Britian in 1927). Was a secretary for the Malthusian Society after retirement.
I have something of an issue with how both PZ and other commenters have characterized RB Kerr in terms of the present, rather than he needs to be considered in the light of his times. He makes common cause with Virginia Woolf, HG Wells, and GB Shaw.
Fatuous sexist crap has always been a hallmark of eugenics, ever since Galton walked around recording pretty women, and came to the conclusion that the women of London were prettier than those of Edinburough. I can’t speak to the racism in his earlier comment, but I would suspect that his measured antisemitism, might have been considered progressive for the time. ( I also find the commentary interesting from the standpoint of Goldhagen’s argument for cultural culpability on the part of the ordinary germans in the holocaust if there was this class of discussion this early in Hitler’s rise to power)
Denmark has a nasty history of forced sterilisation as well.
As a result until recently one had to be 30 to get sterilised and now people are worried because a whole 300 people chose that option last year. “Poor dears. Don’t know what they’re doing. Spawnspawnspawnspawn!”
@robinson
While people are all not one thing, and society is a huge part of why we do what we do we need effective and functional ways of creating moral disgust for cultural behaviors that lead to people being treated as tools and slaves. A person making terrible arguments, using terrible reasoning, and more that lead to the dehumanization of others is a terrible person. Among other things, we are what we do and people who do terrible things or support terrible ideas are terrible people. Any terrible things that I have done would make me a terrible person to the people affected by my beliefs and actions. Historical context does not erase this.
robinson @35:
I wondered how long it would be before someone showed up to say “you can’t judge people in the past by the standards of today”.
I wonder, was slavery wrong?
Was it wrong for the Catholic Church to sell upwards of 300,000 babies over a period of 50 years during the 20th century?
Was it wrong for the US to imprison 127,000 Japenese-Americans during WWII?
I also wonder if the standards of Kerr’s time were all the same. Was there no one who thought differently than he did?
2kittehs @1 – only if the women are suitably “sexually alluring”.
/strangeloveaccent
*passes RobertL a hanky*
Bit of drool, there, just…yeah. You got it.
Not true at all. For example, Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet, was the great-grandson of a black slave from Ethiopia who rose to become a Russian aristocrat. Alexander Dumas’s grandmother was a black slave in Haiti. Neither is generally referred to as “black”, although both would have had to ride in the back of the bus in the segregationist South, and would have been deprived of the vote in apartheid South Africa. Really, the general point is clear enough, without highly dubious cases like that of Beethoven, or this kind of exaggeration.
Yes, there was. For example Catholic propagandist and writer G.K. Chesterton (repulsive as he was in many respects), anthropologist Franz Boas, sociologist Lester Frank Ward, biologist Lancelot Hogben, geneticist and psychiatrist Lionel Penrose.
Also, probably one or two silly ladybrains, but no one was writing that down, obvs.
Also, he got tied-to-the-train-tracks silent movie music bang on in the first movement of the Waldstein.
Prescience!
He got damsel-tied-to-the-train-tracks silent movie music bang on in the first movement of the Waldstein, too.
Prescience!
Gah.
Appassionata.
Too many open tabs …
Eugenics is *artificial* selection, not natural selection.
Eugenics was advocated long ago by Plato in his Republic (Book V). He proposed that the leaders of his Republic marry people by lot, and that they rig the lots on eugenics principles. He justified it by stating that that’s what you do if you breed domestic animals.
Plato’s Republic’s leaders lying to their citizens as a deliberate policy? Plato also advocated that for his society’s religion. His society’s religion would be banned from it because its stories included numerous bad examples, like heroes lamenting and gods laughing. In its place was to be an official religion that he called a “royal lie” or “noble lie” (gennaion pseudos). According to it, the Republic’s philosopher-rulers are made with gold, the soldiers with silver, and the common people with brass and iron, with all that it implies about their hierarchy.
Those damn radical feminists, hating sex and stuff so much, the human race might go extinct because of them!
Damn but that sounds familiar.
Loren Petrich @47
According to Rudyard Kipling this metallurgy might have been more appropriate than Plato intended,
Gold for the mistress, silver for the maid
Copper for the craftsmen, cunning at his trade
Very well said the Baron sitting in his hall
But iron, cold iron is master of them all.
If anyone has read Ernest Newman’s Life of Wagner they might have heard that he himself speculated that he might have been the son of a Jewish actor friend of his mother or… something like that (I can’t remember the exact details). Bertha Geismar in the Baton and the Jackboot (an apologia for Wilhelm Furtwangler) seems fairly convinced of something of the sort. I wonder whether Wagner’s antisemitism was the result of people thinking him Jewish (“Look, I’m not Jewish!”)?
RobertL @39
True! :D
And oh dear, I could hear the Strangelove accent then …
submoron @50
Antisemitism was popular in middle and upper class Germany at that time. Wagner was following the cultural trend of his friends and admirers.
I agree, Al Dente but I’m wondering whether he joined in because his appearance could be considered ‘Jewish’. I would wonder whether antisemitism was popular only amongst middle and upper class Germans. My mother was born in Germany in 1927 and though her “Familienbuch” described her family as “Aryan” she emerged with an extreme hatred of racism and she seemed to consider it ubiquitous. But perhaps you meant that it was only those classes that Wagner considered?
Argueably, the best writer of the 1920’s was Austrian Jew Stefan Zweig. He was also the most popular. He was an erudite who knew just about everyone who was anyone among European intellectuals. He wrote the lyrics for Richard Strauss’s opera, “The Silent Woman”(Die schweigsame Frau)based on a Ben Jonson play. Though the Nazis tried to dissuade Strauss, Strauss insisted on Zweig as the author. The opera was performed one time in Germany before the Nazis banned it.
I have two recordings of it from after the war, one from former East Germany and the other from Austria. Besides his fiction and biographies, be sure to read Zweig’s autobiography “The World of Yesterday”. That gives one of the best descriptions of the rise of Nazism.
In other news, people a hundred years ago were extremely racist and misogynistic. Reading that rancid pile lets me know that!
Yes, probably, but in the nature of the case, there can’t be any evidence of it. I admit I used the first few names I found that seemed reasonably well confirmed, and none of them were women (or black, or working-class, or AFAIK gay, Jewish, or disabled). After a brief search for anti-eugenicist women of the period in question, the best examples I can find are a couple of letters to Karl Pearson from Mary Dendy, Honorary Secretary of the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded, raising some practical difficulties in applying eugenics. I’d be interested if anyone else can do better. But it’s notable that there are a number of contemporary examples of women who made clear eugenicist statements; in addition to those already mentioned, Victoria Woodhull and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were eugenicists. Here is an interesting paper on “eugenic feminism”, dealing specifically with Woodhull, Gilman and Sanger. Just as with men, it appears that among those women whose voices could be heard at all, eugenicists were a clear majority.
Brony@38, tony@39:
Sorry for the late reply. I’ve a strong interest in the history of science, and try to with hold judgement until I am clear on the facts. The issue I have is a minor quibble–it has to do with the flavor of eugenicist. I don’t think Kerr defends Hitler. The commentary in the June issue that Kerr responds to supports eugenic legislation in Germany, but points out that rather than include the Jews as degenerate, that Hitler should enlist German Jewish scientists into the sterilization effort. It appears that the reference to Mendelssohn is taken from Richard Wagner’s 1850 screed about Jewish composers and may reflect contemporary musical values.
All of this is morally and ethically repugnant, but this is the heritage of population biology, genetics, woman’s rights, and population control. We need to keep the story as straight as possible. A distinction had been made between positive eugenics and negative eugenics (Kevles?). The first favored enhanced breeding by those with desirable traits; the second, elimination of those from the breeding population with undesirable traits. I don’t know enough about eugenics at this period to be certain, but it appears that the ‘science’ of these individuals eschewed race as a criteria for elimination of the inferior (probably so long as they were white–after all ostensible though fraudulent criteria for the elimination of non-whites has already been formulated– as described by SJ Gould).
A couple of points.
*Minor quibbles that detract from valuable overall points tend to annoy around here. We get lots of little bits of “noise” from many sources that in aggregate do serious damage to the signal that is being made about the overall social issues.
*An example of the above is that a pedantic pointing out of intent (which PZ acknowledges) amounts to a distraction from terrible things that Kerr is participating in. For people trying to get the Jews treated better back then, and for people concerned about analogous issues now such an effort distracts from their efforts. You are in effect doing the same think that Kerr is doing here and missing PZ’s larger point which takes this into account.
*Which leads me to my third point. If contemporary musical values reflected by Kerr are racist, they are still harmful to people and I feel no different.
Feel free to keep the story straight, but do it in another place where you will not be undermining the efforts of others. Especially when it looks to me like your point was in fact accounted for. You are not going to get a very good reception because of what your comment does regardless of intent.
As for negative eugenics, I am quite familiar with it since my wife and I both have diagnoses that have led us to practice it ourselves. The important point being that WE have chosen it and the concerns of people here are targeted towards those who would coerce others with respect to reproductive choices.
A bit from Moses Harman’s “A Free Man’s Creed” from the August, 1908, issue of The American Journal of Eugenics:
” he suggested that only unenlightened women would be “so unfortunately constituted as to feel a repugnance to intercourse with every man capable of making a good father.””
He’s clearly physically unfit to father anyone’s child … the glasses are evidence of bad eyesight.
I don’t know how Kerr could have missed hack mathematicians like Felix Hausdorff. How could anyone mistake topology, set theory, orderings, functional analysis, measure theory, Hausdorff spaces, and Hausdorff dimensions as being anything other than degenerate Jewish mathematics? Other than that, I still haven’t figured out how you determine what mathematics is Jewish, but how could Hitler have been wrong?
We only need to look at Einstein to see the ruinous effects of Jews on physics. Just thought Kerr needed a little support for fields that have such obvious examples but that he didn’t feel qualified to speak about.
Kerr’s insight into the place of women in the scheme of the perfect world are equally inspiring.
“eugenics” — “good genes” — well, everyone’s for good genes — but the big, core problem there is hubris. In actual fact we don’t have much of a clue what alleles are good and what alleles are bad. Although after a lot of work, biologists have finally found a *few* alleles that are clearly terrible. (Most of them cause spontaneous abortion, of course, so there’s really no work involved in preventing them from propagating…)
But, for example, is the sickle cell anemia allele “good” or “bad”? Well, it turns out that it depends whether you’re in a malaria-ridden zone, doesn’t it?
Whenever someone advocates for choosing “better” X, and we have *no real way of knowing what’s better*, bigots and those with selfish-motivated biases will fill in the gap and claim that “better” is whatever goes along with their prejudices.
This is all over the place: an example in a wildly different area is the conflation of “progress” with “fossil fuel extraction”. Or “better transportation” with “more road lanes”. Or “security” with “hiring lots of armed thugs and spying on everyone”. Or “better families” with “two-parent mixed-gender nuclear families”. Or “better society” with “higher measured GDP”. Or… OH YE GODS I COULD GO ON FOREVER