Eugenics
Eugenics
Here's an interesting article on eugenics, basically stating that the Nazis weren't the only ones looking to create a "master race". The article focusses mostly on eugenics as practised in the United States, which is why I thought some of you might enjoy reading it.
Oh, yeah, eugenics was vastly popular in most of the West. It's been compared as the Global Warming of its time.
There is then a need to guard against a temptation to overstate the economic evils of our own age, and to ignore the existence of similar, or worse, evils in earlier ages. Even though some exaggeration may, for the time, stimulate others, as well as ourselves, to a more intense resolve that the present evils should no longer exist, but it is not less wrong and generally it is much more foolish to palter with truth for good than for a selfish cause. The pessimistic descriptions of our own age, combined with the romantic exaggeration of the happiness of past ages must tend to setting aside the methods of progress, the work of which, if slow, is yet solid, and lead to the hasty adoption of others of greater promise, but which resemble the potent medicines of a charlatan, and while quickly effecting a little good sow the seeds of widespread and lasting decay. This impatient insincerity is an evil only less great than the moral torpor which can endure, that we with our modern resources and knowledge should look contentedly at the continued destruction of all that is worth having. There is an evil and an extreme impatience as well as an extreme patience with social ills.
Really, it was the Nazis who ruined it for everyone else: although support didn't disappear until a few decades ago, the West really lost its taste for eugenics after we found out Hitler was doing it. [Why we thought it was okay to keep freeways is unknown to me.] There are still things out there serving the same purpose in the same way, but now it has to be called something else. Whatever you call it, there are certainly logical arguments for selective breeding; this is one of those issues in which scientific possibilities exceed moral tolerance.