Darwin, Fertility, and the Fittest (Part-2)

Avanthika Nambiar

This is Part 2 to another article. Read Part 1 for context.

Darwin, Fertility, and the Fittest

Malthusianism in China

It is not just individuals who have taken up this Neo-Malthusian stance, but also governments. The most recent example is that of India and China enforcing a One-Child or Two-Child policy. As two of the most populated countries in the world, the anxieties spread by the Global North regarding how these countries consume the most resources led to eugenic ideas taking over government policies.

China strictly controlled the reproduction and fertility of its citizens from 1979 to 2015 through its one-child policy, which seemed to target women disproportionately over men. Chelsea Follett explains in a 2020 policy analysis: “The one-child policy saw over 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions. Many of these procedures were coerced.” China has relaxed the one-child policy to a two-child policy since 2015, but there are still repercussions for those who have many children. Moreover, from a eugenics angle, reproductive regulation is still being practised on minority groups like Uyghur Muslims. A recent report said that many of the female detainees were sterilized without their consent through injection of an unknown drug and that they only realized it when they stopped getting their periods.

Malthusianism in India

The situation in India may be slightly more lenient, but during the Emergency period, civil liberties were suspended and large-scale sterilizations took place in 1975–1977. Lower-class communities, slum areas, etc. were the ones who came under pressure during the campaign for population control by Sanjay Gandhi, the son of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. People were sometimes enticed with the promise of money or other provisions if they agreed to undergo sterilization, but most of the time, they were threatened with homelessness, legal charges, cutting off the water supply, and losing education/ career opportunities. Therefore, those who could afford such things without government support, i.e. the affluent, got away without sterilization, while the poor had no other choice.

Whether or not this program was carried out with direct eugenic intentions, the effect was similar to that which was proposed by Malthus and Spencer in their idea to weed out ‘inferior’ lower class persons and have society be dominated by the ‘superior’ upper class. Even post-Emergency, when some Indian states enforced the Two-Child policy, several couples started getting abortions upon learning that the child was female, in hopes of having at least one son in the family. The fear of being imprisoned or fined, or losing access to government jobs increased female foeticide.

The same was the case in rural areas of China, where along with foeticide/ infanticide, any unaborted daughters were sold to child traffickers. Interestingly, neither India nor China was called out for human rights violations by international authorities. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) bestowed a Population Award in 1983 to Indira Gandhi, and Qian Xinzhong, head of China’s State Family Planning Commission, for demonstrating effective population control.

The Problem with Malthusianism

The truth is that the problem presented by the Malthusianists is not even real. Overpopulation of human beings does not leech the planet of resources to the degree we expect. Instead, the real issue is with the hoarding of resources by a privileged few and their misuse. Social Darwinists’ claim of human beings in a struggle for existence, out of which only the ‘best’ may survive, works on the assumption that there is something inherently good and inherently bad when this is a subjective division.

The question of who gets to decide which traits are “fit” and which traits are “unfit” for a progressive future population is answered thus: the need to divide human traits into superior and inferior always comes from a position of power, wherein those in power otherize people who are different to them. For example, the so-called superior traits that Darwinists have historically recognized are that of the white / light-skinned, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied and wealthy man, who as a bonus belongs to the dominant religious group of a given area.

Simply put, the people who have been in power for a long time deem themselves the pinnacle of human evolution, and purposefully give those not in power a lower status, which is supported by institutions that the powerful themselves have built. Because of this, eugenics has always been used as a tool of oppression under colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and the like.

For example, colonisers have carried out eugenics in the name of race and nationalism in countries like India-Pakistan-Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Japan, USA, Canada, Australia, and Germany, where some native groups of people were proclaimed as unfit to live by another group of people — usually outsiders — and subjected to extreme measures which caused a significant reduction in their population. The people most affected in these minority groups have always been those of lower social status — from the class divide created by capitalism, and women as well as those of “deviant” genders and sexualities (thanks to the heteropatriarchy).

In the 21st century, One ought to be highly suspicious of scientific endeavours that claim to find the genetic factor causing certain traits in humans, especially if those traits have a history of oppression and undesirability. Some examples would be the attempt to discover the gene responsible for autism, or the “gay gene”, or say, a genetic component that causes women to be submissive. More often than not, the thirst for this kind of discovery is tied to eugenics and has a good chance of resulting in an attempt to remove the gene via technology like CRISPR to create a “healthy society”, thereby targeting already oppressed groups.

Conclusion

Social Darwinism does not have the moral and ethical backing it claims to have, as we can see the violence meted out to the oppressed groups — even if a group of people were inferior, no one has the authority to control them or erase them from existence.

One can go one step further and argue that Social Darwinism does not even have the biological backing it appears to function on, which is that certain traits in a species can survive into future populations if they are naturally selected. Darwin’s original theory suggested that every species that is alive is fitted to its habitat, so it is meaningless to say that some are not fit enough. Darwin also explained that variations take place in every population, which need not always be beneficial and sometimes can be neutral.

On the whole, Social Darwinists’ vision for a utopian human society through evolution retaining their superior qualities is false because it is not only unethical but also unscientific — evolution does not mean progress, it merely signifies change.

References

1. Chung, Yuehtsen Juliette. “Better Science and Better Race?: Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics.” Isis, vol. 105, no. 4, 2014, pp. 793–802.
2. Darwin, Leonard. “Eugenics in Relation to Economics and Statistics.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 82, no. 1, 1919, pp. 1–33.
3. Follett, Chelsea. Neo-Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India: Overpopulation Concerns Often Result in Coercion. Cato Institute, 2020.
4. Leung, E. (2013, September 14). Hitler, Adolf. https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/5233e5615c2ec50000
5. Rogers, James Allen. “Darwinism and Social Darwinism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 33, no. 2, 1972, pp. 265–280.
6. Roughgarden, Joan. “Challenging Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection.” Daedalus, vol. 136, no. 2, 2007, pp. 23–36.
7. Stack, David. “CHARLES DARWIN’S LIBERALISM IN ‘NATURAL SELECTION AS AFFECTING CIVILISED NATIONS’.” History of Political Thought, vol. 33, no. 3, 2012, pp. 525–554.
8. Stern, A. (2014, April 29). Sexuality. https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/535eee2d7095aa0000
9. Business Standard. (2020, December 18). Why avoiding a nation-wide two-child policy is the right decision. Business Standard. https://www.business-standard.com/article-amp/current-affairs/why-avoiding-a-nation-wide-two-child-policy-is-the-right-decision-120121800194_1.html