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> By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans. These scientists

• reese_john 10y ago
  Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
• rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  To their credit, race was thought of differently before the discovery of the double helix. It was only until the 70s that people commonly believed that Neanderthals became white people because their bones were discovered in Europe, and that Homo Erectus created the Asian "race" because their bones were discovered in Asia. Nowadays race more often means skin color and a deterministic culture, with the occasional addition of crude metrics such as IQ to justify preexisting biases.
• vixen99 10y ago
  Just to be clear, this was not a small group of pseudo intellectuals. Eugenics was applauded almost universally by Progessives and Conservatives among others. Included we can count J. Maynard Keynes, Irving Fischer ('prevention of breeding of the worst'), Gunnar Myrdal (economics Nobel Prize) Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and dozens of other famous names. You can say that eugenics was 'received opinion' in that era.
  • nemild 10y ago
    And even later it was someone like William Shockley, inventor of the transistor and Nobel prize winner.
  • klenwell 10y ago
    Don't forget the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his infamous phrase: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell Holmes is an intellectual hero of mine. I keep it as a reminder that we all have our historical blindspots.
  • anigbrowl 10y ago
    Very true. While postmodernist philosophy is often denounced for its embrace of relativism the implicit aversion to moral absolutes, I would argue that it's the inevitable reaction to an excess of certitude during the modernist period and the resultant atrocities. This has a philosophical parallel in the excess of certitude afforded by religion. I'm arguing not that religion or science or political ideologies are inherently violent , but that once the tenets of a belief are accorded axiomatic status, an epistemological break with reality occurs and the fanatical response to the cognitive dissonance that inevitably results is to attempt to bring reality into line with the subjective belief. This is well summarized by cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek; if you have Netflix then I heartily recommend watching the whole of this film there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RLn28mrLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RLn28mrLU Of course nobody is immune from this. I have subjective beliefs that I treat as axiomatic and I'm sure Zizek does too; it would be hard to get through the day if you weren't able to take anything for granted. But when we are engaged in philosophical thought, we should seek to minimize the axiomatic content of our argument and be clear about our reasons for designating some subjective beliefs as axiomatic. I believe strongly in a natural right of self-defense, for example. To justify this (to myself, not necessarily to anyone else), I observe that in nature, when animals or even plants are attacked and there is no possibility of evading the attack, they attempt to retaliate in some fashion in hopes of causing their antagonist to break off the attack. Of course I could be falling victim to a naturalistic fallacy here, and indeed there's a strong argument in western culture that the willing sacrifice of the individual self in pursuit of some collective good is a more effective strategy than direct confrontation; however the utilitarian argument for this course is predicated on the existence of an afterlife - if not in the sense of a physical heaven and hell, then in the sense of a collective memory of the sacrifice which informs the future behavior of the collective organism. This too is an axiomatic belief for many people, but it in turn is subject to question; one might argue that is the death of ~6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust, most of whom went to their deaths compliantly rather than confrontationally is the largest identifiable sacrifice in accordance with a general principle of non-violence, how is it that only a few generations later anti-semitism has become fashionable once more, and there is a social contingent eager to resume such genocidal activities under the auspices of some warmed-over conjectures about racial superiority. Insofar as there's a conflict between the natural instinct to retaliate (which may or may not scale) and the social imperative to sacrifice oneself (which may or may not improve the strategic position of the embattled social group) I lean towards the natural instinct because it's the product of millions of years of evolutionary competition vs. thousands of years of social cooperation, but I feel like it would be a mistake to uncritically adopt either position as the correct one and then never question it again. This may seem very abstract and intangible when I express it in philosophical terms, but given the high level of political polarization and the various socioeconomic and geopolitical circumstances that obtain today, we are or soon will be forced to make decisions on the basis of such fundamental beliefs and then live or die with the consequences. I claim, therefore, that an examination of our fundamental beliefs and the means by which we qualify them is a matter of grave urgency, because under sufficient stress we default to acting without thinking, and those actions are the products of the beliefs that we choose to hold.
• maxerickson 10y ago
  State run eugenics programs continued in the US into the 1960s and 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizati...
• jackhack 10y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out. This was "settled science" of the day and to question it put one against much of the world scientific community. Just as a flat earth and an Earth-centric universe were once completely accepted without question, so was this. And today, in our age of satellites and electronic computers, we have our own misconceptions - areas where nagging little doubts or details that don't quite fit the model (and are therefore trivialized or ignored outright). Examples: The unidirectional linearity of time. String Theory vs classical quantum model. Or even the "big bang" model. Our (lack of) understanding gravity and quantum entanglement. Hopefully future generations with more understanding will look back at us, shake their heads, and ask "how could they have been so naive?" I think the answer is, we're really not that far removed from our ancestors scratching the dirt with sticks and learning to control fire. Hopefully with continued inspection (introspection?) we get closer to the truth of science and its beauty.
  • pas 10y ago
    Just FYI, String Theory is very much a quantum (field) theory. (See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ccXzM3x8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ccXzM3x8A )
  • fl0wenol 10y ago
    >flat earth This is "common knowledge about past common knowledge" which was never true, a somewhat ironic detail given your larger point. It was common knowledge the earth was round since antiquity (as long as we've had sailors).
• georgecmu 10y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299061/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299061/ American and German eugenicists were in close contact with each other, especially after World War I: they were working together in international organizations, following and even reporting on developments in eugenics in each other's countries. The Germans did, in fact, borrow much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring (the so-called 'sterilization law') from the model sterilization law drawn up for the various states by Harry H. Laughlin, Superintendent of the ERO, and a number of American eugenicists were impressed with the Nazi eugenical laws after 1933.
• ideonexus 10y ago
  Another dimension to consider in this is to be careful in how we demonize the Anti-Evolution people from this time in history as well. I do believe that William Jennings Bryan of the Scopes Monkey Trial was a very ignorant man in many regards, but the textbook he was protesting was horrifying in for they way it promoted eugenics. I wrote about this here after listening to a presentation from an anthropologist on the subject, who argued that Bryan--a liberal Christian--was strongly motivated by his opposition to eugenics: http://ideonexus.com/2007/12/02/the-complex-william-jennings-bryan/ http://ideonexus.com/2007/12/02/the-complex-william-jennings... In lessons learned from history, Jennings made the mistake of attacking the textbook on the validity of evolutionary theory instead of for the abhorrent promotion of eugenics. As a result, history remembers him as a buffoon rallying against a now-obvious scientific truth. I see a parallel today with many Climate Change denialists, who attack the science instead of attacking the policies being put forward using the science for support.
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    > history remembers him as a buffoon rallying against a now-obvious scientific truth Well, some of that, but mostly he's remembered for being a powerful populist politician that delivered the "cross of gold" speech.
• masklinn 10y ago
  > It literally took a world war to knock eugenicists out of the mainstream. That was still pretty mainstream post-WWII in the US. And of course it's undergoing a renaissance as "race realism". > As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves. Aren't these issues exactly why modern progressives tend to be wary of cultural absolutism and monocultures?