Okay, now that I have your attention, let’s talk for a minute.
I know it’s the week of the Intersections festival, that we’re preparing to launch the Bar Chaplain youtube channel in a few days, and that there are a thousand other things going on right now, but I wanted to take a little time this week to address something that’s been on my heart for a while:

I’m worried that the word “Nazi” is going to lose its meaning in the near future.
It’s being thrown around constantly these days as a term for anyone who holds an extreme viewpoint that’s different than my own extreme viewpoint. This is a problem. You see, the terror of the Nazis should transcend modern political allegiances. It’s not just an insult to be compared to history’s most notorious bad guys; the Nazis are a cautionary tale about what happens when our humanity is compromised on a national scale.

Consider this: Would the world be better if we could get rid of certain genetic traits? Well, in the century leading up to World War II, there was a popular pseudo-scientific movement focused on exactly that.

Charles Darwin had a cousin named Sir Francis Galton who had many important contributions to the fields of mathematics, psychology, and meteorology (like the concepts of correlation and synesthesia). Unfortunately, Galton’s main contribution to the field of genetics was the notion that we should selectively breed out undesirable traits in order to reach racial purification. He called this philosophy “eugenics,” which is Greek for “good birth,” and he was convinced that it would eventually become a key religious tenant across human societies. In Galton’s own words:

“[Eugenics is] the science of improving stock [i.e. people], which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which…takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.” (Francis Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development, 1883)

I know, right? Pretty chilling stuff. The scary part is that Galton’s ideas weren’t really fringe for his day. Before Galton used genetics to argue for white supremacy, many researchers attempted anthropological and economic cases for it. In a famously dubious study published in 1839, the American physician Samuel George Morton measured over six-hundred skulls of individuals belonging to different ethnic groups. While the measurements themselves may have been accurate, Morton’s interpretation of the data aligned suspiciously with the racial stereotypes of his day, using the various head shapes to explain intelligence and personality. Morton’s research would be used to justify the treatment of Africans as a wholly separate species.

Even prior to Morton, Thomas Malthus’s prediction of an impending global food shortage had people asking questions of how best to control the population, a sentiment famously voiced by Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol: “Well, if he’s going to die, then he ought to do it and decrease the surplus population!” Once Darwin’s ideas were published in 1864, theorist Herbert Spencer got ahold of them and, fusing them with Malthus’s thoughts, coined the term “survival of the fittest” based on Darwin’s work. Once this concept was applied to humanity, the “Social Darwinists” were able to justify all sorts of cruelty toward the lower classes.

All this to say, Galton was not the first to think in these terms, and sadly, he was not the last. We’ll see the ramifications of Galton’s work in tomorrow’s post.