Wellness, Eugenics, and RFK, Jr.
Bowler Hat Science from Matthew R Francis
I’ve been in my new house for almost a month now, so finally things are settling down a little bit. For me personally, that is: obviously things are not going well in the world right now. So, let’s talk about the resurgence of a concept that was in vogue 100 years ago, fell out of favor (at least in public conversations), and now is back in a big way.
Eugenics is Always Bad, Actually
“Eugenics” is a term coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who — like many who developed statistics and genetics — was horrifyingly racist. The prefix “eu-” is from the Greek for “good”, and among other things pops up in the name Eugene/Eugenia/Yevgeny and all its variations, along with words like “evangelical”. The idea behind eugenics, therefore, is the “improvement” of the human race, a basic idea that appeals to many across the political spectrum, with participation from scientists, doctors, and many others.
And some eugenics concepts can sound good on their surface, especially if you engage in binary thinking where if you aren’t a eugenicist, you favor “dysgenics”: making humanity worse. (Dysgenics, by the way, was a term coined during World War I to say that society was going to decline because all healthy young men were sent off to die, while only the unhealthy remained home to carry on with fathering children. No space to unpack all of that today!) Many people in the early 20th century joined eugenics societies, which ranged from simply trying to encourage wealthy educated (white) people to marry each other and have more children, to advocates for forced sterilization or even massacre of poor people, immigrants, and especially people of color.
The goal was basically the same: more of the right kind of white people, fewer or none of the people dragging the species down with their inferior genes. Some were nicer than others, but frankly the whole concept should horrify us if we think about it for more than two seconds. Who decides what is “good”? Unless you’re a complete genetic determinist, who believes (against all evidence) that society has no effect, you acknowledge that some people are given unfair advantages and disadvantages based on circumstances of their birth and upbringing. Those eugenicists call “bad” are more often than not people who were just born with certain traits (autism, Downs, autoimmune dysfunctions, etc.) or to parents in poor circumstances. I would argue in a just world these have no moral dimension at all, and I hope you would agree with me.
The Nazis’ extreme eugenics involved forced sterilization of mixed-race people and the "unfit”, which included folks with mental and physical disabilities. They also infamously deported, imprisoned, tortured, experimented on, and executed queer, trans, Roma, and Jewish people, all in the name of “purifying the Aryan race”. This level of violence damaged the reputation of all eugenics, causing most adherents to step away from it, at least in public. A few vocal hangers-on, like Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley, mostly lost favor except with the vilest racists.
Wellness, Eugenics, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
However, eugenics never died out completely: it just changed names and tactics. If you’ve taken an IQ test, you’ve participated in eugenics: the tests used in American schools are designed to rank people according to their “intelligence”, which conveniently is measured by the same test. I don’t have space here to dissect IQ’s problems, but test-takers from wealthy families score higher, and scores improve generationally through better nutrition and other conditions that supposedly have nothing to do with intelligence. Even if you accept IQ at face value, it’s an individual measure, but eugenicists still use it to condemn whole groups. Charles Murray, most infamous for his book The Bell Curve, has called for an IQ-based apartheid which coincidentally aligns with racial apartheid, for instance.
As Mother Jones journalist Julia Métraux documented in detail, President Donald Trump also habitually uses “low IQ” as an insult, expresses the desire that people with disabilities should die, and talks a lot about “good genes” (particularly his own). His rhetoric is strongly Nazi-like, but I want to talk more about the eugenics agenda of his cabinet, particularly Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Independent journalist Talia Lavin recently dissected Surgeon General nominee Casey Means’ food obsessions in detail, comparing it to ritual purity and convincingly describing it in terms of the psychological disorder orthorexia. Kennedy meanwhile has a more explicitly eugenicist agenda, with his callous statements about children who have died of measles — a disease that had been largely eradicated from the US but is not making a comeback partly due to anti-vaccination attitudes Kennedy has done his share to propagate.
For those who don’t remember, Kennedy was an environmental lawyer who gained infamy around 20 years ago with a piece in Salon.com that promoted the discredited and fraudulent link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Beyond having no basis in science, Kennedy’s views reflect the (unfortunately common) eugenicist belief that autism is “dysgenic” in some way, a disease that needs to be prevented or cured, even that being autistic is a fate worse than death.
Kennedy and Means have also both said things that indicate they reject the germ theory of disease: that microbes such as bacteria and viruses cause sickness. Instead, they are part of the “wellness” movement, which in its extreme forms places the entire responsibility for your health on yourself. If you eat the right foods, build the right environment around yourself (e.g. don’t use plastic, expose yourself to the right kinds of radiation, etc.), and practice various types of meditations, you just won’t get sick.
I’ve heard this attitude described as “healthy people don’t get sick”, which sounds like a tautology, but it highlights the basic principle of “wellness”: your health comes from inside you. If you get sick, it’s your own fault: you didn’t eat the right foods, etc. Never mind that everyone is healthy until they’re not, and sickness comes for us all because diet won’t stop you from getting COVID-19, drinking raw milk rather than making you healthier exposes you to disease-causing microbes, and cancer (whatever they tell you) has existed longer than humanity. It’s eugenics dressed up as folk wisdom, stating more or less explicitly that some people deserve to get sick and die, and we should not intervene with things like vaccines (which they say don’t work) or mask mandates (which actually wiped out a strain of flu! but you won’t hear ol’ RFK Jr. talk about that).
Wellness culture is not all as extreme as RFK Jr.’s version, but many aspects of it flirt with eugenics nevertheless. Worse, we have a President who openly espouses eugenics and violence against those he deems unfit, and cabinet members who tell you to “do your own research” while suppressing actual research that saves lives. Eugenics is back in a big way, and the more we call it by its name — and remind ourselves of the humanity it denies us — the better we will be able to combat it.
Nice Neighborhood, But the Neighbors Are Really Dead
Bowlerhattishly thine,
Matthew
Support me: