Eugenics is a product of democracy and Musk's musings show why
Limits on voting because everything old is new again
Note: This post includes ableist slurs.
Quite a few have commented on Elon Musk’s musings about restricting suffrage to parents.
Notably but not surprisingly he does not make clear what his definition of parenting is. Under my own terms his father might not have any. But we do know that in the past Musk has expressed his view that “smart” people weren’t reproducing as sufficiently or swiftly as he desired.
Specifics aside, this seems like a good opportunity to discuss why eugenics is a product of democracy not a fascist regime - although it is highly useful to the latter.
Musk’s comment about the childless having little stake in the future was part of a reply thread which started with an Islamaphobic organization’s tweet and others claiming that single white women’s failure to marry and have children was turning France into a Muslim majority country. He then agreed with a reply that stated: “Democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.”
This exchange could have been air-dropped from a time machine returning from another century.
The history of eugenics is not as simple as it is often presented. During its original heyday even some of its most ardent supporters knew the ‘science’ supporting it was suspect. Much support for eugenics had less to do with misplaced zeal for Darwin’s evolutionary theory than it did with the ruling class’s fear of the masses and democracy - particularly the right to vote.
Before delving more into that, I want to clarify the term eugenics.
When disabled people point out that eugenics is still very much a thing in today’s politics and culture - never tossed away just given new labels and moved into a less public place - people are quick to shout, ‘that’s a lie you stupid, insane, lame losers’ or some other version of unintentional irony. And then they get all puffed up with the confidence of someone who just scrolled Wikipedia and assert that eugenics was about forced sterilization. This is followed by what they think is their mic drop: No one [except Indigenous women] is being forced or coerced into sterilization in Canada today.
And of course they don’t address Canada’s present use of coercive state power to kill disabled people because death isn’t sterilization so it can’t be eugenics (in their opinion).
Their understanding of eugenics is incorrect and conveniently narrow. It is a little like suggesting that if planes had been invented at the time of enslavement and were used for transport it would no longer fit the definition.
For example, it is indisputable that eugenics played a major roles in shaping our immigration policy.
Francis Galton himself said eugenics is “the study of agencies under social control which may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations.”
Eugenics was and is an ongoing project and it was always the plan that the how would be tried and adjusted as required.
But even that definition is lacking. To really understand eugenics you have to understand the motivations behind it.
Galton, like many other white men born into wealth, were very concerned about holding onto their money, power, privilege and way of life. They looked down and around the globe and using the tools of Enlightenment, they‘rationally’ and ‘scientifically’ asserted they were definitely the best specimen of human. (They = white, upper class, non-disabled men.)
Colonialism, enslavement and inequality within society, they argued, existed because of the natural inequality that exists among humans. At the same time they feared the dangers posed by democracy and in particular by expanding suffrage to more and more of “those people.”
Of particular concern at the time was the fact that the people they viewed as a threat/lesser/undesirable members of the human race, were procreating in greater numbers than the ‘better’ people (people like them). This preoccupation proceeded his interest in his cousin Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and the connection between number of offspring and expanding suffrage within democracy is, I assume, obvious - more of those people voting!
Eugenics was/is a means to an end, namely protecting the wealth, power, privilege and status of those who have it from their list of people they viewed as threats to it: racialized people period - no qualifiers beyond being not white were required; disabled people (if white they were polluters of the great white gene pool and regardless of race they were burdens and threats); women, (the healthy, better specimens made good breeders of sons and voting, education, etc would interfer with that focus and their sole purpose); poor people, particularly those who were destitute, used drugs, were deemed criminals, or were unwed mothers or others they regarded as immoral and deviant such as members of the LGBQT community; and various others including members of different ethnicities or faiths, or even different Christian denominations. The focus and nature of eugenics was modified then as it is now and reflects the country and time so there were/are differences between UK, US and Canada, but that level detail doesn’t matter to the point being discussed.
Getting back to Elon Musk’s tweets…
The fears of the original eugenicists never went away so much as they were managed by things like propaganda and public relations through the manufacturing of consent. One book of many I’d recommend if you want to know more about the role of public relations is Stuart Ewen: PR: A social history of spin.
For a number of reasons the rich feel more threatened by the potential power of the masses right now - pick your escalating crisis as one explanation - climate change, housing crisis, supply chain issues, a pandemic, the collapsing of infrasture and systems due to decades of neoliberalism, the fact people just aren’t buying their bs quite as much…
So we are seeing a reemergence of a more transparent, bold and shameless eugenics alongside the clawing back of the rights of the exact same groups that were on Galton’s list.
On the one hand Musk’s musing about attaching voting rights to parental status may seem to run countrary to logic since it could act as a means to encourage more people to become parents - so-called positive eugenics, measures designed to encourage procreation among the white, wealthy and non-disabled. But first of all let’s remember we are talking about rich people - people who pay ungodly amounts of money to venture to one of the most dangerous places on the planet in a contraption built and run by a man who laughed in the face of safety regulations. So it is always possible this is just shitposting. Secondly, again there’s the fact Musk didn’t define “childless” - Indigenous people in particular are aware of how white supremacy can work inside that space. And finally, it can be read as part of a larger context - everything is on the table, especially right now. This should already be apparent given the repealing of hard won rights in the country to the south of us and the broadening of laws like MAiD in Canada.
Of course ‘everything is on the table’ cuts both ways - which is exactly what people like Musk fear now as people like him did then. On the platform Musk bought and is driving into the ground people discussed radical politics in ways unprecedented in history - sharing resources, learning materials, organizing aid, resources…and most of all information that could not be evaporated or contained by the gatekeeping of the mainstream media decisions about what constitutes news and is important and worth knowing - or from whom.
I wish voting rights had turned out to be as dangerous as they feared them to be. My hope is that we the great unwashed, the surplus humanity, the ‘lesser’, the oppressed, really do become the threat they fear by embracing being the majority who need, desire and are capable of building a better and more just world. The world they fear is the future we need.
Some additional reading:
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2785&context=ethj
https://hal.science/hal-03464194