Paul,
No. Not at all, but then again, maybe. I'm not up with Greek in the least,
but the "eu" seems to have a fuzziness about it that sort of crosses the
boundaries of certain of our Desirability (Lemke 1998) lexical resources:
well, healthy, fit, happy, easy, pleasing, nice, good, etc. A lot of the
full-on eugenicists from the turn of the century appear to have been
doctors, priests, and economists [facilitating an historical heteroglot, a
hybrid discourse of moral technocracies]. I take it ("eu" in eugenics) to
mean, on the most part, "well, healthy, fit" rather than, say, "good,
happy, pleasing", but this seems a rather fuzzy distinction too. The
originator of the whole concept seems to have been Herbert Spencer, an
economist/apologist for the worst excesses of high Capital, ironically
buried right opposite K. Marx at Highgate.
I quote from a copy of the _Westminister Review_ that I have on my shelf
from 1913 [vol 180, no 4, pp. 377-386] to demonstrate the fuzziness of
"eu". It infuses the whole discourse. It's an article by one S. Herbert
entitled "Eugenics in relation to social reform":
"In contradistinction to this school - the economic school [of social
reformers PG] - which lays the whole stress on the material factor of the
environment, we can put what we call the ethical movement, which holds that
the instillation of moral principles in the individual is of prime
importance, believing that a better race can be reared by moral precept". ...
[There's one semantic split for "eu"]
"But this is just the aim which the Eugenist has set himself. His ambition
is nothing less than the betterment of the human breed itself. ...
The law of the Survival of the Fittest assures the continuous progress of
the race, by always keeping the surviving members of the species up to the
standard. The analogy with Artificial Selection is a close one as far as
the principle of selection goes; but as to the method of selection, the
analogy must not be pressed too far ..." [because the "economic" and
"moral" methods are very different PG]
[There's the health/fitness discourse of "eu". Now ...]
"We may accordingly divide the eugenic methods into those of Direct and
Indirect Selection of human stocks. The former, which consists in the
deliberate making out of certain human types with reference to proagation,
is generally looked upon as the specific eugenic remedy. ... According to
common usage in eugenic writings, we may, for convenience' sake, subdivide
eugenics into Negative of Restrictive, dealing with characteristics which
are undesirable and have to be repressed, and Positive eugenics, which
deals with socially desirable types whose propagation is to be encouraged
..." [then he emphasises that direct-indirect positive-negative divides
into four distinct approaches]
"To come now to the direct negative method, we have to deal first of all
with those socially undesirable types which so far have loomed largets in
the mind of the professed Eugenist, and through him the eye of the public.
We refer to the pathological conditions of feeble-mindedness and insanity
... Seeing that the majority of these are hereditary in tendency, and that
their rate of proliferation is in excess of the normal birth-rate of the
population, all means of care and tending of these mentally-afflicted
members of the community can have only one effect, that of fostering the
unfit at the cost of the fit, so long as no precautions are taken to limit
their further propagation. It is essential that, however humanely we feel
for or deal with the unfortunate victims of hereditarily-tainted stocks, we
should, for the good of society, stop the continuation of their evil kind.
..."
And there's good/evil. They go on ... essentially, he defines it as
"race-hygienics" at one point. Hence "something stinks".
Thus the evaluative scope of the ineffable "eu", a not-too-distant ancestor
of Desirability perhaps. A pun at best; at worst an all-encompassing
prefix, like "un" or "non". "Genesis", too, is loaded to the gills, drunk
on progress, development, evolution, perfection, inevitability.
When I get back, in a week or so, if anyone wants a photocopy of this
beastie that displays so many of the socio-technical Darwinism tenets
inherent in the multilateral biotech discourses of today, please email me.
Phil
At 19:21 05-12-99 -0800, you wrote:
>Phil,
>
>I'm not sure about this but once heard from someone knowledgeable that
>Thomas More's Utopia was a play on words since it's meaning in Greek is both
>"good place (eutopos) and noplace (utopos?). By extension then, eugenics
>could mean "good origin" and also "no origin" making it a subtle statement
>about the relationship between human qualities and their biological origins.
>Not exactly what the folks you cited had in mind I suspect.
>
>Paul H. Dillon
>
>
Phil Graham
p.graham@qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html
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