Eugenics is a combination of beliefs and practices whose primary goal is to improve the genetics of human beings. Before World War II, eugenics significantly impacted the history and culture of the Americans (Engs, 2017). The U.S. practiced eugenics many years before the Nazi of Germany and as such was the origin of this practice.
Eugenics could be justified from the point of view that man has kindness and pity and also the power to prevent suffering. As such, the man intended to replace the natural selection that came with creation so that he could control the birth rate (Engs, 2017). By so doing, the man designed to reduce premature deaths that could result from overpopulation and scarcity of resources. Eugenics proposed early marriages with the aim of improving the race by producing fit human beings. This could be true since children born of young parents are known to have relatively higher IQs and their survival rate is also higher (Engs, 2017). Eugenics, therefore, targeted the production of only the number of people that the world could adequately support and it had to be the best stock.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
However, despite all the benefits of eugenics, the cultural environment was affected, and people began to judge things like the IQ level of individuals, their physical appearance and whether they were ‘fit’ to live or not. As such, the cultural environment of the 19th and early 20th centuries became highly militant in their attempt to ‘cleanse’ the society (Engs, 2017. There was a need to have a superior class of people only; people with an excellent physical appearance, with a high IQ and only those who bore excellent qualities. As a result of this need, euthanasia became the order of the day; a practice which is culturally unfit given that it is meant to destroy life. Culture ended up shifting from the regard for growth into a culture of killing in the name of cleansing.
Reference
Engs, R. C. (2017). Background to the Eugenics Movement and Influences on Friedrich Hayek. In Hayek: A Collaborative Biography (pp. 225-279). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
