The Weak
Over the course of my adult life, there is a conversation that people keep bringing up to me. Here is the idea, simply: that civilization shields humankind from the elements of nature. Nature is cruel, and the highest law is survival of the fittest, which can only be carried out by killing the unfit before they can contribute to the gene pool. This protection afforded humankind by civilized society means that the weak survive, whereas in an alternate, more “natural” environment, the weak might be weeded out by natural forces.
This idea sounds Darwinian, but the idea predates him by a long shot. Malthus wrote about the constraints of the planet to support humans on it, and the notion that population growth might one day outpace our ability to supply resources to the entire population. (The so-called “Malthusian catastrophe”.) Roughly a century after he expressed this concern, Western civilization decided to take it upon itself to cull out “the weak” from society, in an effort to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring.
This lead to the terrible blemish in American history which is known as the eugenics movement. Since the idea of getting rid of “the weak” was devised by people from wealth and privilege, it invariably played out that the poor and less abled were the ones who were deemed unfit. It was among the lower social classes that people found themselves being forcibly sterilized.
For all of the horrors that this idea has caused, it seems that people still casually toss around the idea that civilization might be preventing natural selection from occurring, which is a detriment to the species overall. I don’t understand why people cling to this notion. It does raise what might be a momentarily interesting question: society might thwart nature’s raw mechanisms; what are the possible consequences of this?
When someone poses this idea to me, I ask them to define who they feel “the weak” are. Is it based on money? Power? What kind of power? What is the benefit of eliminating this segment of society? And so on. I usually end the conversation by asking them to convince me that they themselves are not part of “the weak” caste they describe. It never gets me any closer to understanding the truth, but their answers tell me what criteria this person uses to divide up human beings. Nothing tells you more about a person than how they choose to divide people.
This idea sounds Darwinian, but the idea predates him by a long shot. Malthus wrote about the constraints of the planet to support humans on it, and the notion that population growth might one day outpace our ability to supply resources to the entire population. (The so-called “Malthusian catastrophe”.) Roughly a century after he expressed this concern, Western civilization decided to take it upon itself to cull out “the weak” from society, in an effort to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring.
This lead to the terrible blemish in American history which is known as the eugenics movement. Since the idea of getting rid of “the weak” was devised by people from wealth and privilege, it invariably played out that the poor and less abled were the ones who were deemed unfit. It was among the lower social classes that people found themselves being forcibly sterilized.
For all of the horrors that this idea has caused, it seems that people still casually toss around the idea that civilization might be preventing natural selection from occurring, which is a detriment to the species overall. I don’t understand why people cling to this notion. It does raise what might be a momentarily interesting question: society might thwart nature’s raw mechanisms; what are the possible consequences of this?
When someone poses this idea to me, I ask them to define who they feel “the weak” are. Is it based on money? Power? What kind of power? What is the benefit of eliminating this segment of society? And so on. I usually end the conversation by asking them to convince me that they themselves are not part of “the weak” caste they describe. It never gets me any closer to understanding the truth, but their answers tell me what criteria this person uses to divide up human beings. Nothing tells you more about a person than how they choose to divide people.