Progressives have often founded and supported eugenics movements. This article, Progressivism, and the ‘German Idea of the State’, by Tiffany Jones Miller, begins with this disturbing sentence:
In 1923, Fritz Lenz, a German physician and geneticist advocate of forced sterilization–a man who became one of the leading advocates of the Nazi’s “racial hygiene” program–criticized his countrymen for lagging behind the United States in the enactment of sterilization laws.
This should be disturbing to Americans, that our progressive `reformers’ were ahead of the 20th century pack in sterilizing human beings judged as inferior, because of race or because of cognitive problems or because of membership in families sunk in poverty for generations or because of syphilis infections or many other reasons.
Progressivists do have a major problem, of sorts. They jumped on the Darwinian bandwagon early on, though the heart of a progressive isn’t really in the principle that better entities slowly form by responding over generations, through genetic variations in individuals and social experimentation in communities amongst other ways, to their environments. Darwinism might be fine as a way of destroying traditions, especially Christian traditions, but the progressives know they can derive a few good principles and go on to make the processes of evolution and development more rational and a lot more rapid.
The tendency to apply predetermined principles to reality, rather than learning from reality, holds for most modern thinkers, including those opposed to progressivist distortions of reality. Self-labeled conservatives and traditionalists simply have their own distortions of reality as I pointed out in my previous essay, Modern Thinkers Aren’t Nearly So Smart as They Think, the main point of which is not that I have any a priori knowledge or pre-existing mental skills to judge other thinkers but rather that God is the smart one and we should learn how to think by shaping our own minds, even our greater selves, in response to the thoughts God has manifested in Creation. We are only born as clever apes but we can become smart in the way of God, however incompletely and imperfectly, by learning to imitate God as He goes about His work as Creator and Sustainer and Shaper of created being.
So progressivists see Darwinian processes as subject to the sort of analyses which allow us to understand by way of a priori mental schemes, not to understand by letting our own minds develop as God tells His story. The Darwinian processes might have traveled contingent pathways in the biological past, but the smart guys can understand how evolution really should work and what the goals are. If modern human communities seem to have created a problem by allowing the survival of inferior human beings, defective family-lines as well as individuals from otherwise good family-lines, then we simply prevent them from reproducing. At least in the initial stages of such policies, sterilization in medical facilities is used rather than gas chambers. Death by medical experimentation might occur or even death by lack of medical care as syphilis or other diseases are observed, but no large-scale murder, yet. We modern peoples are humane enough to allow resources to be wasted on defective human beings so long as we can prevent them from producing the next generation of banjo-picking idiots. (See the movie, Deliverance.)
Improvement of our race seemingly can’t happen if nature’s axe is put away, so men have to eliminate those born defective and those rendered defective by undisciplined sexual activity or alcohol abuse.
Progressivists give the rest of us a chance, but we better make good on it and please them in ways that seem to change over time. Once supporters of a rather conventional middle-class morality, they have supported child-labor laws, various consumer safety laws, and the like. In more recent decades, they’ve supported major medical research programs for AIDS, same-sex marriage, and continued the 200 year-old battle to destroy the traditional family. They’ve had allies to be sure. The neo-Marxist Horkheimer once noted that true, honest radicals owe a big favor to the oh-so progressive businessmen of our Modern Age who’ve shown they can more effectively destroy that traditional family than can the smartest and most vicious of radical dictators. This is frighteningly plausible and forces me to wonder why most traditionalists have been so ready to see politicians as enemies while thinking businessmen are merely the Christian church producing for the marketplaces. To be sure, some such as Pat Buchanan have been more skeptical of at least the executives of large corporations as well as Wall Street, but such traditionalists are in a minority.
The attitudes of progressivists can be contradictory for sure. I know some who support the elimination of AIDS so that Americans can engage more safely and freely in all sorts of sex and also condemn Mother Teresa of Calcutta for all she did to save the wretched poor of Calcutta and other cities around the globe. Apparently, Americans who don’t act according prudently for their own survival and reproduction are still superior to sub-Americans.
In that same article, Progressivism, and the ‘German Idea of the State’, from the blog at The Online Library of Law and Liberty, Ms. Miller also writes:
The Progressives, at least, understood that their approach to reform was animated by a new conception of government or, more precisely, “the State.” Importantly, this idea, the “German idea of the State,” departs from the American Founders’ understanding of government in a couple of key respects, both of which help explain the Progressives’ enthusiasm for eugenics.
For the Progressives, to begin, the power of government is NOT limited in principle to securing the natural or “inalienable” rights of man, as the Declaration of Independence has it. “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as the German-trained progressive political scientist and future New Dealer Charles Merriam concludes in a 1903 survey of progressive thinking,
…
But the Progressives did not advocate an indiscriminate exercise of power; rather, in their view, the ultimate aim of “the State,” the “good” or objective whose pursuit determined the need for government action, was a particular conception of human excellence or “perfection.” The guiding object of ethics, and hence the State, Ely explains, is the “ethical ideal,” the idea, that is, that individuals are entitled to the “most perfect development of all human faculties [physical, mental, moral, aesthetic, etc.] . . . which can be attained[.]“ In short, the guiding principle of the Progressives’ domestic reforms, the aim that guided their assessment of existing social conditions, was a felt obligation to improve the relative level of physical, mental and moral development in America.
…
The very labor reforms which softened the “law of competition” seemed to enable “defective” individuals–including the “feeble-minded” and “paupers,” as well as persons afflicted with syphilis, gonorrhoea, epilepsy or tuberculosis–to survive in higher numbers and thereby generate “an enfeebled progeny.” To counteract this, and to perfect the relatively indiscriminate and otherwise stultifying effects of “natural selection” (or “competition”), Ely urges embrace of “man’s selection.” In a passage which reads like a pithy, but chilling, distillation of Ely’s conception of reform, he likens “man’s selection” to the role humans play in propagating plants and animals
The State, or state if you prefer, doesn’t seem to have been desired by progressives for its own sake but because it was a concentrated form of power which could be used to reshape human communities at various levels and scales to the ideals of those intellectuals who considered themselves progressive. Nor, as Miss Miller sees matters, did they worship power for its own sake but only for its uses in pursuing some misguided idea of human excellence. By the way, this is a specific point where true traditionalists could have raised a strong objection from their knowledge of history, assuming such exists and is reliable. As Lord Acton told us from his profound understanding of history, powerful and centralized governments attract men with the moral character of gangsters. I think he would not have objected to someone pointing out that such gangster types could probably out-compete do-gooder intellectuals in the struggle to control powerful and wealthy institutions. The reader should be thinking of highly intelligent gangsters such as Genghis Khan and Caesar Borgia rather than street criminals or even most of the publicly acknowledged drug-lords.
You could say that the strong ties between the State and certain forms of power make the State itself, at least in the eyes of some of its admirers and enemies, no more than an entity which holds and exercises sovereign power which can’t be limited by any power on earth but another sovereign state. Modern history seems to teach us that revolutionaries can grab hold of the State or they can destroy the State and much that it holds power over, but reform of the State into something better, an entity which respects its individual and communal members while exercising power responsible, isn’t possible. Not all revolutionaries are good at holding power but almost all are far better at gaining and holding power than are men humble enough to wish to limit the exercise of governmental power. The gangster Stalin grabbed power and killed the dedicated Communists in the ranks of the Bolshevik party. Gangsters, revolutionaries and snakes in the traditionalist grasslands, outdo both true radicals and morally well-ordered leaders in gaining and holding onto power.
It is also the case that the United States has provided some serious evidence that you can’t change a foreign state into some preconceived form, even when the would-be reformers include at least a goodly number of men and women with seemingly noble motives. On this general topic, see Why We Can’t Build or Rebuild the Countries of Other Peoples where I discuss the problem in the context of American efforts to help the Haitians, legitimate efforts as well as imperialistic.
Kenneth Minogue, most certainly not a fan of power-abusers, had a more subtle statement regarding the nature of the State in The Liberal Mind:
The State is not an aspect of society; it is the only unity that society can lay claim to. [page 131]
Unity can be something good, especially for those of us who believe this world is the story of the formation of the Body of Christ. But the evolutionary and developmental processes of this world can be ugly and bloody, and—to put it bluntly—we don’t know how to develop a centralized government which will remain morally well-ordered and will exercise only power proper to its true responsibilities, especially if the realm of that government becomes large and prosperous. In The Liberal Mind: Can the State be Limited?, I discussed this problem: how to move toward a State which can do its job without being taken over by men with the moral characters of gangsters, the very sorts of men that Lord Acton claimed to be attracted to centralized and powerful governments—though he, like me, thought better is possible and might someday be done. Near the end of that essay, I write:
In retrospect, things look very bad for any who would speak of the American state as being a morally ordered community, one caring for all its members and—at the very least—maintaining a level playing field. But we should remember that failures in a dynamic world of evolution and development don’t mean that the effort was wrongly directed. It might be that multiple tries are needed for one reason or another. In other words, our failures are likely the failures of creatures living in the early stages of an evolutionary process, a process in which a variety of social relationships are forming and a variety of ways of stabilizing those relationships are coming and going. The American State as we know it is going, probably pretty fast. Such is true of most of the states in the West as well as those around the world, even in the Orient, which have modeled themselves upon some orthodox or heretical view of political systems advocated in the academic and journalistic communities in New York City or Paris and sometimes actually tried in the American State or the Soviet State or the Italian Fascist State.
If the nets of salvation are to gather in many, communities of various sorts are needed to care for the many who don’t have the initiative or the talents to explore Creation and to think through what they discover. Communities of various sorts are needed for the blind and the timid—if they are to be saved. That is to say—human communities must care for the weak and cowardly in the flock. After all, God could have created a world which would have terrified and broken the strongest and most hardheaded of men. By God’s highest standards, all human beings are lacking in intelligence and initiative and courage and faith, but, in His mercy, He has set lower standards for us.
I’m now ready to claim that we need some form of the state to compensate for weaknesses and to satisfy positive desires of the members of the Body of Christ. I’m also claiming that God will give us what is needed for that Body.
What then has gone wrong with the state in recent centuries? Let me just hint at an answer by addressing one specific problem I see in our efforts to form communities and to govern those communities.
What has gone wrong with the state, or State, is related to what was wrong with the progressive, and classical liberal, projects from the start. We took the State, an entity evolving and developing in time, and decided we could plan its perfection and control it on a path of development toward that perfection. Instead, we created a great prize to be won by various sorts of political and military and financial gangsters. To be fair, conservatives and traditionalists made the less dangerous error of thinking it possible and desirable to have frozen the American government as it was in its early stages of development. It might have grown into a more attractive and morally better ordered adolescent but it’s rather silly to think it would have been better, or possible, for the American government to have remained at a stage of development comparable to a human two year-old.
Now I can mount my hobbyhorse and start talking about created being and the modern reluctance to produce an understanding of created being which accounts for modern empirical knowledge and some set of beliefs which provide some serious understanding of our world and the human mind which would encapsulate that world and, indeed, all of Creation. Progressive thinkers might feel good about their own Enlightened selves, but they aren’t very rational, at least not in the sense of being in synch with empirical reality. In a phrase I’ve used in my writings, progressive thinkers haven’t made peace with empirical reality. To support change and improvement as a general policy is to assume you can do more than is possible in a world which is driven forward by evolutionary and developmental processes which we can influence but not plan and control as McNamara thought he could plan and control the war in Vietnam, as Bush II thought he could plan and control the conquest of Iraq, as central bankers think they can plan and control the decaying economies in 2013.
I wrote about this issue in Reason Comes from Our Interaction with Empirical Reality where I wrote:
We trap ourselves when we try to limit our activities to those which can be planned or to any foreseeable activities because those, by definition, can only correspond to known forms of reason. We can learn new forms of reason if we’re willing to explore our world courageously and without too many preconceptions, even when we tinker with things or ideas in a seemingly arbitrary way. If our tinkering produces something worthwhile, then we should sit back and contemplate our actions and their results, whether we’re dealing with a new way of picking a banjo or a new way to sort records on a computer. From these contemplations we might derive new and richer understandings of Creation. We can even be said at times to have entered into more abstract realms of being.
In fact, it seems quite possible to read the history of human thought in a manner quite consistent with this. We have to try to temporarily set aside our modern viewpoint formed during centuries when a certain type of rationality allowed for extraordinary progress in understanding many aspects of Creation, gathering mountains of knowledge of this concrete world and abstracting from that knowledge to derive various sorts of physical laws and theories as well as less rigid ways to understand history and to understand living creatures in general. Seen in proper historical context, the earlier form of reasoning developed by the Greeks, `rationalistic’ or `Euclidean’ but not tied tightly enough to empirical reality, also had a good run of allowing progress in understanding Creation in its concrete and abstract realms. Similar statements can be made of the mythical reasoning developed in the centuries before the early Greek scientists and poets prepared the ground for the philosophers.
Will we move on from here? Is the reason of the modern world the end-all of human thought? I doubt it. Our children will not only know things about reality which would amaze us—they will reason with power that might frighten us.
What is the result of trying to impose one’s non-empirical thoughts upon the world? In Progressives Kill Progress in Future Generations, writing about the humanitarian side of progressivism and not the eugenics side, I note:
Progressives, with their tightly organized programs embodying strong views on how to solve certain problems lock future generations into specific ways of organizing their political and social and economic activities.
…
Whatever you might think about the solutions of the New Deal, whatever true urgency you might attribute to the construction of the national security complex after World War II, we’re stuck with the particular programs and institutions, we’re stuck with the costs and the large number of federal bureaucrats and even engineers and scientists who are making good livings doing what might not need to be done any longer. If those things ever needed to be done.
Let us instead turn to Creation and return to the true tradition of Christianity, methodical realism, which provides a good meta-understanding by which we learn how to think by exploring God’s Creation and shaping our minds to the manifested thoughts of the Creator.