Eugenics and Pope Benedict XVI
Like a lot of other people I've been absorbing the information that the new Pope was once in the Hitler Youth. Today's New York Times discusses the meaning, or lack thereof, of this long past association. The article contained this quote from the Pope's biographer:
Under Hitler, Ratzinger says, he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them.
This reminded me of why keeping after the truth about psychosurgery past and present is a vital mission. When science and medicine are distorted, people suffer and sometimes even die. It seems impossible, but WWII demonstrates how medical theory gone amok can combine with circumstances to create a holocaust.
Nazis were, of course, not the only ones who believed in eugenics - the idea originated in the UK and was advanced by wealthy American families and research institutions. Before the German eugenics program even began at least seventeen U.S. states had forced sterilization laws. In fact, in 1927 the US Supreme Court legalized the forced sterilization of the "developmentally disabled, the insane, or the uncontrollably epileptic". Before you start yawning over all this distant history, know that Virginia practiced eugenics, forced sterilization, until 1979(!).
Apparently the idea of simply, you know, caring for the poor was considered by many to be a ridiculous waste of resources. Why should the productive members of society be saddled with the inferior, poor ones? Many even believed that "assisting the poor" was actually stealing from the productive and truly valuable members of society (does that remind my fellow Americans of any recent political trends?) "Let them die out and do everyone, even themselves, a favor," was a common refrain. Eventually eugenicists got what they wanted on quite a grand scale. The number of people who died in the name of eugenics is unfathomably immense and painful to contemplate.
Nearly all educated people took eugenics as truth. President Herbert Hoover had actually attended a eugenics seminar in 1921 and I can't help but wonder if this is why he waited so long to act when economic collapse was cascading around him. Maybe the suffering of the unemployed didn't hit him as hard as it would have if he had never been exposed to these "let them eat cake" theories. In contrast, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the few who didn't buy into the idea that a wheelchair-bound man was a useless burden to society, and by extension didn't believe that the poor were inferior trash either.
What awful acts do we commit in the name of science? We hold people down and force pills down their throats or injections into their bodies, even while they scream in protest. We tie them up and hold them indefinitely. We whisper that they are biologically damaged and inferior. We operate on their brains even though we don't really know what they hell we're doing, because being "inferior" is so terrible that we will take any chance to make them "normal". We think they are quite a burden on the productive members of society. We can't even just let them be homeless - they still "get in the way" and we demand their removal from the streets.
I don't really know how Pope Benedict XVI will incorporate what he saw of Nazi brutality into his work. I can only hope that the message is sincere and that he will be an ally of those who seek fairness and justice for all human beings.
Under Hitler, Ratzinger says, he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them.
This reminded me of why keeping after the truth about psychosurgery past and present is a vital mission. When science and medicine are distorted, people suffer and sometimes even die. It seems impossible, but WWII demonstrates how medical theory gone amok can combine with circumstances to create a holocaust.
Nazis were, of course, not the only ones who believed in eugenics - the idea originated in the UK and was advanced by wealthy American families and research institutions. Before the German eugenics program even began at least seventeen U.S. states had forced sterilization laws. In fact, in 1927 the US Supreme Court legalized the forced sterilization of the "developmentally disabled, the insane, or the uncontrollably epileptic". Before you start yawning over all this distant history, know that Virginia practiced eugenics, forced sterilization, until 1979(!).
Apparently the idea of simply, you know, caring for the poor was considered by many to be a ridiculous waste of resources. Why should the productive members of society be saddled with the inferior, poor ones? Many even believed that "assisting the poor" was actually stealing from the productive and truly valuable members of society (does that remind my fellow Americans of any recent political trends?) "Let them die out and do everyone, even themselves, a favor," was a common refrain. Eventually eugenicists got what they wanted on quite a grand scale. The number of people who died in the name of eugenics is unfathomably immense and painful to contemplate.
Nearly all educated people took eugenics as truth. President Herbert Hoover had actually attended a eugenics seminar in 1921 and I can't help but wonder if this is why he waited so long to act when economic collapse was cascading around him. Maybe the suffering of the unemployed didn't hit him as hard as it would have if he had never been exposed to these "let them eat cake" theories. In contrast, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the few who didn't buy into the idea that a wheelchair-bound man was a useless burden to society, and by extension didn't believe that the poor were inferior trash either.
What awful acts do we commit in the name of science? We hold people down and force pills down their throats or injections into their bodies, even while they scream in protest. We tie them up and hold them indefinitely. We whisper that they are biologically damaged and inferior. We operate on their brains even though we don't really know what they hell we're doing, because being "inferior" is so terrible that we will take any chance to make them "normal". We think they are quite a burden on the productive members of society. We can't even just let them be homeless - they still "get in the way" and we demand their removal from the streets.
I don't really know how Pope Benedict XVI will incorporate what he saw of Nazi brutality into his work. I can only hope that the message is sincere and that he will be an ally of those who seek fairness and justice for all human beings.
2 Comments:
Although the eugenics movement was begun in Britain, we never actually had sterilization laws. The eugenicists campaigned for them and they got as far as parliamentary committees but laws were never actually passed.
Support for eugenics came from both radicals and conservatives. Daniel J Kevles gives a good description of the sort of people who made up the eugenics movement in his book "In the Name of Eugenics":
"Eugenics enthousiasts in the United States and Britain were largely middle to upper class, white, Anglo-Saxon, predominantly Protestant and educated. The movement's leaders tended to be well-to-do rather than rich, and many were professionals - physicians, social workers, clerics, writers and numerous professors, notably in the biological and social sciences. Leaders and followers alike had the time and inclination to attend lectures and debates, interested themselves in public affairs, and thought it necessary to keep abreast of science and to set their social compasses by the new discoveries. Fully half of the membership of the British eugenics society consisted of women..."
Meanwhile opposition came notably from the Catholic writer G K Chesterton and Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood.
German psychiatrists went further than other psychiatrists with their idea of "life unworthy of living" and murder of mental patients but similar ideas were not completely alien to psychiatrists elsewhere. For example, for example a follow-up study of 300 of Wylie MacKissock's psychosurgery patients in the 1940s found that about one in 16 of them had been killed by the operation. If not "life unworthy of living" then certainly life that wasn't worth very much, life you could take risks with.
Thanks for the clarification, Sue.
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