A Response to a Specific Quote by Steven Pinker

This post concerns the concept and role of eugenics in this age of genetics. Steven Pinker, responding to a “conventional wisdom among left-leaning academics that genes imply genocide”, proffers the following (it is quite an old quote dating from 2002):

“But the 20th century suffered “two” ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn’t believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it’s not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It’s the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.” [The other, unmentioned in this quote, is fascism]

While he is not arguing, per se, for genetic determinism, he gets this partly right. It is not that dealing with genes inevitably implies genocide, but the concept he seeks to highlight as a retort to this is a little more complex than what he is suggesting. There must be two mental steps: first, the ideological perception of the superiority of certain (insert noun here, genes/traits/race/class/anything), then the ideological condemnation of inferior (noun) as somehow undeserving of the same treatment/rights/humanity. It is this condemnation of inferior (noun) that led to the genocides and which continues today to lead to social/racial/ethnic stratification and discrimination.

While the first step establishes the space for the second to “operate”, the second is the one that is the “action” step. You can think you are superior, but you don’t necessarily have to condemn/ostrasize/etc, though of course, it probably happens more than naturally in most cases. Both steps may well be equally important, however, when there is no actual ground for establishing the superiority of one over the other. If there actually is such a ground (i.e. actual, not perceived superiority), then only the second is relevant.

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Admittedly, I struggled with this for a while – a key question was: does superiority contain the implicit assumption that the inferior was undeserving, or are the two steps I mentioned consciously separate? Question is open to discussion.