Eugenics, Euthenics, and, Institutionalization

In my last post in this series I talked about social Darwinism and the general idea that was current in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century that humanity shouldn't "molly coddle" the poor and weak because that would just encourage them to pollute the gene pool. This encouraged the worst excesses of capitalism, militarism, and, colonialism. That's talking on the "macro scale". This article is going to show how this way of looking at the world influenced important Canadian policies that continue to be an issue.

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Possibly the most notorious outgrowth of the Canadian eugenics movement was the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928. It's important to understand the context.

First, at the time it was widely believed that a wide variety of human behaviours were considered to originate in heredity. These included:

• mental illness
• mental retardation
• epilepsy
• alcoholism
• pauperism
• certain criminal behaviours
• social defects, such as prostitution and sexual perversion

In theory, you could be forcibly sterilized any of these all of these different issues. But in actual fact---as in most other government policies---the rules were enforced selectively, which meant that this fell disproportionately on the following minorities:

• women
• children
• the unemployed 
• domestics
• unmarried
• followers of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox flavours of Christianity 
• those with Ukrainian, Native and Métis ethnicity

The way the Act worked, the government appointed a committee consisting of four individuals: two physicians nominated by the University of Alberta and the College of Physicians, and, two lay people appointed by the Lieutenant Governor General. This committee was then given the power to order the forcible sterilization of individuals that had been recommended to them by medical superintendents of Alberta mental hospitals. And in practice these superintendents made submission to sterilization part of the conditions of release. In other words, for some individuals the only way to be able to leave was to get sterilized.

The Act was amended at various times, but it stayed into effect until 1972. While still part of law of the land, 4800 individual names were submitted to the four person committee with 99% being approved for the procedure.  

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Dr. Helen McMurchy, CBE.
Public Domain Image c/o
Canada's History.

Similar legislation was proposed in Ontario, but it failed to pass. This didn't stop people from teaching and advocating for eugenics, though. There was a veritable "who's who" of people who advocated for it. One of the most prominent was Helen MacMurchy CBE, who was often a guest lecturer at the MacDonald Institute at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. MacMurchy was a real trail blazer. She graduated with a medical degree in 1901 from the University of Toronto, was the first women intern at Toronto General Hospital, and, the first woman to do post-doctoral studies under Sir William Ostler at John's Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

She advocated for the health of both mothers and babies, and did a great deal of good. But she was also a vocal supporter of eugenics and was appointed "inspector of feeble-mindedness" by the province of Ontario in 1915.

Among other things, she published a little book in 1920 titled  The Almosts: A Study of the Feeble-Minded that draws upon examples from English literature to illustrate the various degrees of "feeble-mindedness" and suggests what she considers would be good social policy towards them. In it she shows a great deal of compassion towards these people. She suggests that they be found a place in society where their particular gifts will be properly understood and valued.

Give them justice and a fair chance. Do not throw them into a world where the scales are weighted against them. Do not ask them to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. But give them one chance to bring out the best that is in them. This is but a fair request on behalf of human beings who nevertheless are permanent children and will never grow up---whose joys, and sorrows, and sins, and virtues are all on a childish scale. Responsibility, except so far as a child understands it, is not in their portion. The achievements of life, for them, are bounded by their mental make-up and character---just as our own achievements are, though on a little larger scale. (The Almosts, pp 170-171.) 

Her response to the existence of the "feeble-minded" was two-fold. First, they needed to be recognized as such and made wards of the state. This was because only government institutions would be able to give them a place where their special gifts could be nurtured, where they wouldn't be forced into a cruel competition for life with people who didn't suffer from the same mental deficiencies, and, where they couldn't be exploited by others.

---they cannot be adequately dealt with unless we stop neglecting the mentally defective and reorganize charitable institutions, work for dependents and delinquents, procedures in criminal courts, and above all education and school-work, according to the facts, recognizing mental defectives as children, the wards of the state, who must receive the training, protection and care---in one word, the home that they need, so they do not mingle with the general community [emphasis added by Bill Hulet] (p-177)

The second important point she promotes is that feeble-mindedness is inherited and society needs to stop it's propagation into future generations. She "pussy-foots" around the issue of birth control---which was a pretty scandalous subject at that time---but an intelligent reader should be able to understand the implications of this language. That's because she goes to great length to point out---using a literary example---that the absolute worst thing for society is when a feeble-minded person is allowed to have children.

She introduces this idea while talking about Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit (a book that I admit that I've never read). One of the characters is an upper class "dimwit" by the name of "Edmund Sparkler", which Wikipedia describes as

A dimwitted, upper class, young man who falls for Fanny Dorrit as a dancer. They meet again when the Dorrits are wealthy, and he pursues Fanny until she agrees to marry him. Before Mr Merdle (his “governor”) fails, he secures a position for Sparkler in the Circumlocution Office.

McMurchy describes the marriage between Fanny Dorrit and Edmund Sparkler

The dark tragedies involved in this problem are, naturally and properly enough, lightly touched upon in fiction. Miss Fanny, though she said Young Sparkler was "almost an idiot," and despised him for his mental feebleness, married him in the end. He could not earn a living---he had no more mind or will of his own than "a boat when it is towed by a steamship". (p-175)

She also underlines this point by saying later on:

"Our duty to our neighbour must now be held to include our duty to posterity." (p-176)

It's important to remember this concern about the propagation of feeble-mindedness into future generations in her social prescription. It seems obvious to me that she genuinely wants to help individual people. But she is also tremendously concerned about controlling the people she sees as being defective so they don't reproduce.

The mentally defective are those who cannot make, or help to make, a home.

We must make a happy and permanent home for them during their lives. The only Permanent Parent is the State. (p-178) 

I think it's tremendously important to emphasize this point, because I think helps explain part of the motivation to warehouse people in institutions. It isn't just to help people who cannot take care of themselves, but rather to control them because they pose a danger to the long-term health of the human race. Humanitarian concern is being linked to social Darwinism.  And, as I hope to show in a future post, that created a great deal of misery for individuals.

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And now, let's talk about "euthenics"---

Dr. Frederkick Tisdall.
Public domain image
c/o the Wiki Commons.

Another famous fellow who used to lecture at the Macdonald Institute has also been implicated in another current of thought that dramatically affected our institutions: euthenics. Whereas eugenics was concerned about improving humanity through weeding out "bad genes", euthenics is about improving the human race through creating an efficient way of living that maximizes an individuals human potential. In other words, eugenics is about nature, and, euthenics is about nurture. The person I'm referring to is a fellow named Frederick Tisdall who is probably most famous for being one of the inventors of pablum.

The story that I'm going to focus on started in WW2 when he held the rank of Wing Commander in the RCAF and he took part in a multi-agency assessment of nutrition in several First Nations communities. They were supposed to take blood samples and other tests to look at vitamin deficiencies, but were struck almost immediately by the amount of chronic malnutrition they were seeing in native communities.

At both Norway House and Cross Lake, they reported that, “while most of the people were going about trying to make a living, they were really sick enough to be in bed under treatment and that if they were white people, they would be in bed and demanding care and medical attention.” Following a visit to the homes of some of the elderly residents of Norway House at the request of the Chief and Council, moreover, researchers found that “conditions were deplorable where the old people were almost starved and were plainly not getting enough food to enable them to much more than keep alive.”

(This quotation comes form Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952 

by Ian Mosby Phd., which I obtained from his personal website.  P-146, reprinted from 

Histoire sociale / Social History.)

What these researchers were seeing was the result of both capitalism and government policy.

The communities in the central subarctic region that were the subjects of these major nutrition studies during the 1940s had been hit disproportionately hard by the economic collapse of the Great Depression. To a certain extent this was because incomes within the fur trade had plummeted, dropping by 66 per cent in the Prairies between 1924 and 1935 and by 38 per cent in Northern Ontario between 1925 and 1935. To make matters worse, many areas had seen steadily declining populations of fur-bearing and food animals during the interwar years, in no small part due to over-hunting by unscrupulous non-Aboriginal trappers throughout the preceding decades.

Hunger in these communities was not simply a product of declining incomes and disappearing fur-bearing animals, however. The 1930s also saw Indian Affairs actually cut back on its provision of unemployment relief. Between 1922 and 1934, the government’s total relief payments fell by 32 per cent, from $242,000 to $164,000. As Hugh Shewell has shown, much of this was done through orders prohibiting relief payments to able-bodied men, reducing sick relief rations, and other forms of so-called “austerity” and “restraint” within Indian Affairs. (Mosby, p-149)

One would think that the normal person's response to seeing a situation like this would be to make a fuss in advocacy of increasing the amount of money being spent on rations for the First Nation's communities. But instead, they decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to study the effects of food supplements on the health of people who are suffering low-grade, chronic starvation!

As Moore [Indian Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services Dr. Percy Moore]  would tell a House of Commons Special Committee in May 1944, “As a result of the survey one of the first steps considered necessary in any program to improve the health of the Indian through better nutrition was to demonstrate whether provision of some of the food substances or food factors found to be lacking in their diet would result in an improvement in their health.” Moore and the rest of the research team therefore almost immediately set about organizing a scientific experiment on the effectiveness of vitamin supplements conducted primarily by the resident physician for the Indian Affairs Branch at Rossville, Dr. Cameron Corrigan. (Mosby, p-151)

There were several nutritional studies, but it needs to be remembered that what the researchers were after wasn't just information about how specific vitamins and essential elements help people suffering from chronic malnutrition. As a result, some of the studies also included anthropologists who did work on the psychology of First Nations people.

That's because they also wanted to find out how they could engineer the behaviour of aboriginal people so they would be more easily molded into mainstream Canadians. That's how euthenics manifested itself in Canadian society. It's important to realize that there is a "nub" of value in the idea that it might be a good idea to select out and remove specific hereditary diseases from the gene pool, but that is nowhere near the same thing as supporting social Darwinism---which is based on very sketchy ideology. In the same way, there is something to the idea that how we treat people has an impact on the way they develop---but that's not the same thing as using social policy to engineer an entire people's culture out of existence. 

Mosby quotes Tisdall speaking to a Parliamentary committee in 1947:

We do not know as much as we should as to what motivates the Indian. We have to find out what incentive we can place in front of him. The Indian is very different from us. We have to find out how the Indian can be encouraged, how his work can be diversified, his efforts diversified, so he can make himself self-supporting, so he can obtain the food he needs. (Mosby, p-154)

As I've mentioned before, I'm trying to not make these articles super long anymore. So I'm going to stop right here. I'll see what I can come up with more information about the dark side of Canadian, Ontario, and, Ontario Agriculture College culture for a future story---.

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At the present time there is a lot of friction being created in society over the place of the First Nations in Canadian society. Knowing about things like the nutrition experiments that were done at isolated aboriginal communities helps people understand the anger that is manifested against "settler" society. (It's certainly helped me---.) That's why I put out the Back-Grounder, and that's why people read it. If you can afford it, why not support me? As little as $1/month would show me that you care about the news. And, it's easy to do using Patreon or Pay Pal. 

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Furthermore, I say onto you. We have to deal with the Climate Emergency! 

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

I generally try to avoid writing on topical issues because I think that the really important stories are on-going. But sometimes I find that I'm timely by accident. I've been researching a future story about First Nations issues for the past few months, so I thought I'd "stick my oar in" about the country-wide protests for this week's op ed. I think that this is a case where background information plus some "big picture" discussion would dramatically increase public discourse.

So here it goes---.

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The first thing to understand about native issues is that First Nation's governance is tremendously complicated. This isn't something that should be blamed on aboriginal people, however, because it is a result of specific government policies that were designed to destroy them as sovereign nations and make assimilation into "settler" society easier.

I first learned about this decades ago when I was involved in organizing watershed congresses along the Grand river. We thought that we should devote a meeting to discuss the land claims in the watershed. What we found out was that there were---in effect---two different competing government bodies competing for leadership of the Six Nations: the elected and traditional chiefs. Because of their refusal to recognize each other's authority, we found we could only have one group represented at the event, although there were "unofficial" people who showed up and gave us the other leadership's perspective on the issue. (They didn't want to set a precedent, but both groups realized we were trying to act in good faith.)

The reason why these two groups compete is simply because of long-term federal government policy. Indian affairs didn't want First Nations peoples to keep their traditional forms of government alive, so they decreed that all interaction with Ottawa had to go through chiefs that were elected through a process spelled-out in the Indian Act. This put the population of reserves on the horns of a dilemma. They needed the money and the ability to interact with the bureaucracy. But they also needed to preserve their traditions if they wanted to survive as a people.

As a result, individuals find themselves having to "take sides" in specific disputes. It also allows outside players who don't put the time into learning about the complexities---or want to mislead uneducated outsiders---to deal with just one group and avoid the other. This is a very old game and it's called "divide and rule". Without being an expert on the specifics, it certainly looks like it's being played between "traditional chiefs" and "elected chiefs" of the Wet'suwet'en. Here's a quick You Tube video that explains what I'm talking about.

This game has been played all across the nation and anyone who is interested in First Nations issues understands this point. That means that all the sympathy protests across the country were "primed" by generations of "games playing" by the Federal government as it attempted destroy the ability of First Nations to effectively rule their own territory.

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For the last month or so I've been talking to a local businessman who is interested in creating a platform where local "indie media" people like myself can publish their work. The hope is that this will create a synergistic effect that helps everyone build their subscription base. The fact of the matter is that I don't think that it is possible to support local news using on-line advertising companies like Google and YouTube. And I don't think pay walls will work either. That leaves the volunteer subscription systems like Patreon and Pay Pal. We are a community of 135,000 now, so it's not that absurd to think that a local news blog like the "Back-Grounder" could build a base of 1,000 people paying $1/month, which would translate into an income of $12,000 a year. That would be fair compensation for the amount of work I put into this and it would allow people to support several different "creators" in Guelph without being onerous. So watch this spot for future developments. In the interim, however, there is still a good reason to subscribe to this news blog.

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This policy went beyond splitting the local leadership on reserves. It also included sabotaging any attempt by indigenous people to create their own leadership class that would be able to "play the settler game" according to its own rules. In the Indian Act of 1876 it was decreed that

Any Indian who may be admitted to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, or to any other degree by any University of Learning, or who may be admitted ... as an Advocate or as a Barrister or Counsellor or Solicitor or Attorney or to be a Notary Public, or who ... maybe licensed ... as a Minister of the Gospel, shall ipso facto become enfranchised 

The important issue here is that term "enfranchised". This meant that if someone got a higher education in how settler society worked, in a way that would allow them to be a recognized professional in that society, they were forced to leave the reserve because they were no longer considered a "status Indian". This effectively stopped the development of an indigenous leadership class that could go "toe to toe" with the government in courts.

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In the short run, both of these policies are good ways to screw over a people that you've conquered. But in the long haul, they are part of an insane policy because they mean that you have removed any effective leadership that settler government can negotiate with. Unless we want to exterminate the First Nations, we have to create some sort of consensus with them about where the country is going. That's because there are enough of them, they are sufficiently mobilized, and, they have sufficient support among the settler community, to create real chaos for everyone else. 

The rail blockades illustrate this power very effectively. Canada ships the vast majority of overland freight using railways that snake through lots of places that are close to First Nations territory. The last week shows how little effort it would take to sabotage a big chunk of our economy if we sufficiently piss off these people. And if the police go in and start arresting---which will eventually mean killing some people---on Wet'suwet'en and other territories, we could see the creation of an internal terrorist movement around land claims. Don't think that this cannot happen, as we already have citizen militias on some reserves and we came precious close to this happening in the 1990 Oka Crisis. 

This is why it is so damned important for reconciliation to actually happen in this country. And why it is so insane for Conservatives like Andrew Scheer to blather on about the need to "enforce the law". That's because this point of view totally ignores the key questions: "Who's law?"---Wet'suwet'en law? Settler law?---and how do you access it when the court system is designed to keep First Nations communities from accessing it like anyone else?

Here's the second wrinkle. First Nations have been trying to use settler law for generations. But the problem is that it is enormously expensive to hire settler lawyers (remember, it was illegal for an Indian to get a law degree) and argue in front of a judge. And the government lawyers had unlimited resources to draw out court battles. So the tactic used by the government has been to drag out decisions for years and years in order to "wear out" the First Nations to the point where they are willing to settle for a small part of what would actually be a just settlement of their issues. There is a saying to the effect that "justice delayed is justice denied".

Is it any wonder that so many First Nations people and their supporters have decided that the legal system is a dead letter, so they have to take the law into their own hands in order to get some action on these long festering problems? 

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The only real way that the long term strategy of Indian Affairs could have worked would be if Canada was willing and able to commit genocide against the First Nations. It tried to do that culturally with the residential school system and the "Sixties Scoop". Both of those have failed, however, which means that "the Indian" was never beaten out of Indians. And most Canadians are not nasty enough to simply murder all the indigenous peoples. So they remain in the 21st century as distinctive peoples. Indeed, they are becoming more and more self-confident nations who are not willing to simply remain at the margins of Canadian society. Moreover, they have also begun to organize education campaigns for mainstream Canadians of good will. There are indigenous rights book clubs in Guelph. I've been to special events in church basements that were completely filled with people interested in finding out First Nation's history. That's why there have been demonstrations all across the country in support of the Wet'suwet'en traditional chiefs.

We are in the midst of a burgeoning civil rights movement that is asserting the rights of First Nations to redefine confederation and the nation state from being one where settlers are completely in control of everything to one where the original inhabitants of the nation are treated as equals in a community of peoples. This is a "sea change" in how people view nationality. (It's also happening at a time when environmental issues are also forcing the people's of the world to work together as one human race. But that's another story.) It's going to happen, whether the conservatives want it or not---just like the era of fossil fuels is also coming to an end. The question is, will it happen peacefully? Or will there be terrorism and decades of nasty violence? That's the issue that Justin Trudeau has to deal with. And as long as he stays on the side of honest negotiation and peaceful resolution, he deserves our support. Once he strays from that path, we need to drop him like a hot rock and find some other politician to work with. Otherwise we face a national disaster---. 

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Furthermore I say onto you. The Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Eugenics in Guelph and Ontario: the Bigger Context

A couple months back I did a walk through of an exhibit at the Guelph Civic Museum that dealt with a part of our past that I doubt most people know about. That is the role that eugenics and social "Darwinism" played in public policy for a very long time in Canadian history.

For those of you who don't know, "eugenics" is the pseudo-science of breeding a better type of human being through "culling the herd" of "inferior" types of human beings. It was promoted by a Victorian polymath by the name of Francis Galton. (Among other things, Galton pioneered the study of fingerprints.)

Sir Francis Galton, chalk drawing by Janet Caroline Fisher.
From the UK National Portrait Gallery, c/o Wiki Commons.

It's not a difficult concept to understand. We breed better sheep, dogs, cattle, etc, by only selecting the very best individuals for breeding stock. Why can't we do the same thing with people?

The problem is, however, that it isn't all that easy to decide what "best" means for livestock, let alone people. For example, if you breed pigs to be lean (something I know a little about), you may find out that in the process you end up with animals that have smaller litters, or are more susceptible to disease, or have behavioural problems, and so on. All breeding is something of a "trial and error" process with lots of "dead ends" and "false starts"---even when you are looking to increase a very specific, easily-measured trait. This problem is dramatically magnified in human beings because a lot of people's most important qualities are very difficult to quantify---for example "morality", "work ethic", "creativity", "empathy", etc. 

In addition, there is the secondary problem of human development being very dependent on conditioning and early life experience. Human beings who grow up in poverty often have extremely limited opportunities for education and personal development compared to people from wealthier backgrounds. But it's very hard for an outside observer to understand where the deficiencies that come from a person's environment end and the genetic components begin.

This isn't a problem in livestock breeding, simply because breeders don't separate their animals into "poor" and "wealthy" groups so they can mistreat the former and coddle the latter. But I do remember that my family once caught a feral pig we found rooting through our vegetable garden and put it into our barn with the animals destined for market. That pig was much smarter than the animals we'd raised from birth! We found that it could open the doors in the pens, climb stairs, etc. This taught me that even with animals like pigs the environment that they grow up in has a huge impact on the development of the individual.

In effect, all the livestock on our farm were "developmentally challenged" because of the limited stimulation their environment offered when they were young. Consider what similar limitations in a young human's early environment might have on his or her development.  

These criticisms have generally discredited eugenics amongst respected, academic researchers. But this hasn't stopped politicians and "reformers" from trying to apply eugenics to social policy. It is just too tempting to use biology to explain class and race differences because it removes any need to talk about the economic and political systems and how they unevenly divide society's collective wealth.

Consider the following graphic:

This is a widely reproduced stock drawing from an article titled Exhibit of Work and Educational Campaign
for Juvenile Mental Defectives, which was published in a 1913 edition of The Survey, which was the official
journal of Charity Organization Society of the City of New York from 1909 to 1937. Public Domain Image.

It could be argued that it represents the limits that intellectual disability place upon specific individuals and their ability to function in society. ("Idiot", "imbecile", and, "moron" started off as scientific terms and were originally meant to not be demeaning. This is why this old graphic uses them.) But this sort of classification system can quickly morph into something else. And at least some people will inevitably start to believe that anyone who does "simple menial work" is by definition a "imbecile" and couldn't possibly work at a better job if one was offered to them.

Various members of the ruling elite could easily draw the conclusion that because someone is at a specific place in the economic pecking order that they are there because of their mental deficiency. By following this line of reasoning I would be seen as being either a "medium imbecile" (because of the years I spent in farm labour and as a janitor) and only reached the level of "high grade imbecile" later in life as a "general dog's body" at the University Library. Because I never learned a trade, presumably I never even reached the level of being a "moron".

Here's another graphic, which reflects this way of understanding society according to eugenics.

Original graphic by D666D. C/o Wiki Commons.

This idea that all of economics and society is a field for competition between people with greater or lesser inherited ability is called social Darwinism. The term became widely understood in the late 19th century and the theory was used to justify the excesses of both Capitalism and Nationalism.

Thomas Henry Huxley, a well-respected naturalist (for example, he was the first anatomist who identified the link between birds and dinosaurs) who was such an effective defender of natural selection that he was nick-named "Darwin's Bulldog", declared in his review of On the Origin of the Species that "---every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism---". (In this context, read "liberalism" as "libertarianism"---again, terms change their meaning over time.) In other words, every evil visited upon the poor and weak could be justified as being simply part of Darwinian selection, and it would be against the laws of nature and damage the human race if any attempt were made to help these unfortunate individuals.

In much the same way, schools of nationalism tended to see competition between nations as being another field for competition that sift out the weak, leaving only the strong. This point of view existed everywhere, but probably became most entrenched in Imperial Germany. Here's a YouTube video that paints the historical context extremely well.

War isn't a disaster that results from economic forces, dynastic politics, etc. Instead, it is a necessary force that cleans out the "human garbage" that accumulates and clogs the gene pool during long periods of peace.

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I understand that January is a difficult time for most people. Retail owners accept that they don't sell much in this month. Charities don't get a lot of donations either. But it's February now, and I'd like readers to consider subscribing to the blog. I don't expect a lot, $1/month really does work for my business model---but $0/month doesn't work at all. It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal. 

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Almost immediately after social Darwinism emerged as a social force there were critiques of it being raised. The most articulate advocate of this opposition was---of all things---a Russian prince who was at the same time a significant thinker in both evolutionary biology and anarchism: Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Peter Kropotkin, photo by Nadar, and preserved in the New York Public Library.
C/o the Wiki Media Commons.

He published a book titled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. It argued that people need to remember that "survival of the fittest" is something of a tautology. That's because the only definition of "fittest" that is implied is just the ability to survive. This doesn't mean "strongest", "most aggressive", "most selfish", etc---it just means "survival of those that survive". And as Kropotkin pointed out, there are lots of examples from nature where animals survive and thrive as communities because individuals mutually support each other (think about social insects, for example.) Indeed, a whole range of evolutionary biology called "selfish gene theory" grew out of Kropotkin's insights once biologists learned about DNA and role it plays in evolution.

It's not a happenstance that capitalists and militarists looked at On the Origin of the Species and found a justification for abusing workers and fighting murderous wars, and, an anarchist saw mutual aid. People start off with basic assumptions about the world around them and use these assumptions to pick and choose evidence that supports those assumptions. It is possible to learn and grow beyond these prejudices, but it isn't an easy process. It requires a great deal of self-reflection and that can often be in very short supply---. 

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Sam Harris, photo c/o
Wiki Media Commons.
Cropped by Bill Hulet

A few years back there was a lot of passionate debate on-line about an interview that Sam Harris did with Charles Murray. Murray is somewhat infamous for writing a book titled The Bell Curve that argues that Black individuals are 15 points---on average---less intelligent than whites. This extremely explosive statement is couched in a lot of scientific language that went over my---and I assume almost every other listener's---head so I found myself having to simply "suspend disbelief" while I listened to it. At least Murray went to great lengths to lessen the impact of what he was saying by pointing out that the difference in IQ between individual black people is much higher than the average difference between whites and blacks. This means that it is impossible to infer that any specific black person is less intelligent than another specific white person---simply because of their skin colour. But as Harris points out, this statement does provide a great deal of "aid and comfort" to white nationalists. 

What I found important about the discussion was that about half way through the conversation

Charles Murray. Photo by Gage  Skidmore,
c/o the Wiki Media Commons.

Murray "switched gears" and started making pronouncements about social policy that didn't seem to have any sort of relation to the first part. Even worse, while he kept saying that the relationship between IQ and genes that he'd said in the first part of the talk was non-controversial in the scientific community (something that I have seen disputed by experts in the field), he admitted that his public policy ideas were very controversial with academic researchers.

The main points he made was that our modern economy places a much greater emphasis on IQ than any other time in human history and that the population is separating out into two different categories---one in which is a superior "over class" and the other is an inferior "under class". The important point for him is that all the usual explanations for inequality in society cannot be explained through racism, poor public schools, class bias, etc. Instead, it all comes down to IQ, and there's absolutely nothing at all that can be done about that. You are what the genes you inherited say you will be, and that's that.

Given that operating assumption that it all comes down to the genes you inherit and no social policy can overcome your physical inheritance, Murray suggests that the only logical thing that the government should do is get rid of every program that seeks to "level the playing field". Instead, he supports a universal basic income. This would be given to every single member of the population, who would be forced to have a bank account. This would make people accountable for managing the money, which would force these poor, benighted souls to at least develop the traditional middle-class virtues of "thrift" and "budgeting".

I mention the conversation between Harris and Murray not because I wanted to explain every nuance of this heated debate, but rather to point out that social Darwinism is still an active part of public discourse. Again, not within the scientific community (neither Harris nor Murray are experts in the field---although they both like to "talk like one"), but as part of political ideology.

As I hope to point out in the future articles on this subject, this worldview was also quite prevalent in Ontario public policy until quite recently. And it had a profound impact on the lives of unfortunate individuals who found themselves caught up in it.   

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Moreover, I say onto you. We have to deal with the Climate Emergency!

Human Idiocy and the Corona Virus

Like everyone else, I've been following the news about the latest new virus coming out of China. Unfortunately, most of the coverage has been about trivial, "human interest" matters---like the Canadians trapped in the Wuhan quarantine.

Having said that, I have noticed a couple more important stories buried under the emotion-laden fluff. I thought it might be useful to mention them---hopefully more to reinforce than to originally inform.

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First of all, I noticed a story in the Toronto Star about health care workers concerned about the Doug Ford's decision to get rid of the previous Liberal government's legislation that gave everyone---even minimum wage people---at least two paid sick days a year. The other thing is that our dear Premier's legislation reinstated the idea that employers can force employees to go to a doctor's office to get a sick note. The sop that the Conservatives threw to workers is that everyone is entitled to three unpaid sick days a year.

As was pointed out, this is a monumentally stupid state of affairs in a world where there things like infectious diseases and epidemics. It means that people have a very strong economic inducement to go to work when they are feeling sick. Among other things, this means that when you buy a meal from a restaurant, there is a good chance that one of the people handling your food will have a communicable disease which they can share with you.

It also means that even if you are lucky to work in an environment with paid sick days you might be forced (as I was several times before I retired) to waste the time of an over-worked health care professional, to leave your home where you are resting (and isolated from the rest of the population), and, wait in a room full of similarly sick people (who might have compromised immune systems) so you can share your illness with them.

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Secondly, I noticed that experts on emerging infectious diseases were complaining that this new strain of disease had probably emerged when a disease endemic in bats managed to "jump species" into human beings. Why would it do so? Well, primarily because some human cultures have a weird tradition of eating "wild animals". I'm not talking about First Nations people hunting seals, caribou, etc---I'm talking about rich folks chowing down on, mmm, delicious bat soup. If you can believe this National Geographic article, China has temporarily banned this trade and lots of ordinary people there are pressuring the government to make this permanent. Here's a short Youtube video that shows the same thing in Indonesia.

As the National Geographic article above points out, this is not an "innately Chinese" thing, but rather something that only a very small number of people do. It is completely and utterly different from what our indigenous people do, as the animals are kept alive, travel long distances, are sometimes factory farmed, and, sold by disgusting markets where many different species are kept "cheek by jowl" in appalling conditions. 

This has created a perfect situation to super-charge the evolution of new strains of infectious diseases for human beings. Just to give you an idea of how bizarre this situation is, there is also some evidence that the virus moved from bats to poisonous snakes (cobras or kraits) before being transmitted to humans. Snakes and bats are two of those species being jammed together in cages at these idiotic disease factories. 

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One last bit of grotesque information. One of the problems that comes from these infectious diseases stems from the fact that in the modern neo-liberal paradise that we've created a lot of our basic research on things like vaccines is done by private drug companies. And the problem is that there's not a lot of money to be made by creating vaccines for emergent diseases. You do that by sending out "germ hunters" to poke around in places like wildlife markets to collect samples and try to figure out what might be the next nasty pathogen. Then these are sent to government laboratories that can classify, identify, sequence the genes, and, so lots of the time-consuming preliminary work that would allow someone to rapidly create a vaccine for it if it emerges as a public health problem. We also need to create infrastructure around the world to keep track of emergent diseases and speed up the response if a pandemic comes along. 

The problem from a business point of view is that almost none of this work will create any revenue because it is preventative. It might be the case that some corporation might end up with something that would end up being used by huge numbers of people---like the current flu vaccines. But the fact is, that there's no real way of knowing which particular disease that will be ahead of the nasty pandemic. And once we have a second "black death" knocking at our doors---given modern air travel---it might very well be too late to accomplish anything before huge numbers of people are already dead.  

According to an article I found in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics there has been a push to create this sort of infrastructure. 

In response, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, Wellcome Trust and the governments of Norway and India co-founded the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in 2016, which aims to “stimulate, finance and coordinate the development of vaccines against epidemic diseases, especially in cases in which market incentives alone are insufficient”. Other entities, such as the governments of Germany and Japan, have since joined as investors.

But it seems to me that it's kinda ridiculous that this is something that is being funded by a small number of countries and a couple charities instead of being something that every nation on earth (or at least every wealthy, technologically sophisticated nation) supports simply as a way of "paying your dues".

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Ultimately, this pandemic is just like the climate emergency. It's a symptom of human governments' inability to deal proactively with problems that are emerging from the dramatic expansion of human technology. Why is it that a scientist can't go to a government, explain this sort of problem, and, then get some action on it? Instead, we have to go through this crazy process where activists have to labouriously build consensus, fight back opportunist politicians who try to whip people into a frenzy of opposition, and, ultimately clean up the mess because we waited far, far too long to take rational action. The existing process simply takes too long and inevitably will lead to world-wide catastrophe. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!