In the current zeitgeist, and even for the past couple of decades, “that’s eugenics” has shut down conversations among intelligent people about important topics like behavioral genetics, reproductive technology and subsidized contraception. “Eugenicist” has been leveled against everyone from Darwin to EO Wilson, to Margaret Sanger, to Bill Gates to Nick Bostrom as a way of signaling that we should ignore everything that person has to say and see everything they do or think as evil and illegitimate. Communist or communism isn’t used in this way and communism doesn’t have this sting. Maybe during the McCarthy era an essay like this could have also been necessary.
And of course people respond angrily if called a eugenicist- it’s a term, as you said, that means “evil” in the current Western zeitgeist (but not in much of the rest of the world, as one commenter noted). This essay isn’t meant to be dispassionate, it’s meant to provoke the reader into rethinking how this term shuts down conversations about ideas and people.
In the current zeitgeist, and even for the past couple of decades, “that’s eugenics” has shut down conversations among intelligent people about important topics like behavioral genetics, reproductive technology and subsidized contraception. “Eugenicist” has been leveled against everyone from Darwin to EO Wilson, to Margaret Sanger, to Bill Gates to Nick Bostrom as a way of signaling that we should ignore everything that person has to say and see everything they do or think as evil and illegitimate. Communist or communism isn’t used in this way and communism doesn’t have this sting. Maybe during the McCarthy era an essay like this could have also been necessary.
And of course people respond angrily if called a eugenicist- it’s a term, as you said, that means “evil” in the current Western zeitgeist (but not in much of the rest of the world, as one commenter noted). This essay isn’t meant to be dispassionate, it’s meant to provoke the reader into rethinking how this term shuts down conversations about ideas and people.
I feel that saying “subsidized contraception is not eugenics” is rhetorically better and more accurate than this approach.
Saying “subsidized contraception is not eugenics” is a lie.
I argue that it’s entirely the truth, the way that the term is used and understood.