Amerika

Think back to a century ago. The intellectuals were sure that Communism was the future since democracy and socialist-style entitlements had taken over Europe and the unions were flexing their muscle on both continents. For the average American, homes with climate control, running water, and telephones were luxuries.

Most people lived on what today we would consider big lots. They had little farms and gardens out back. The wives stayed home and took care of the kids, if you were in the middle class. People walked a lot more than they do now, and had to amuse themselves without electronics.

Back then the eugenics movement first gained steam. Darwinism was still controversial, as the Scopes Monkey Trial showed us, but those who embraced it were seen as scientific and futuristic and many followed the Victorian ideal of good breeding as an essential for the future.

The eugenicists of the day warned that society had become too much of a subsidy for the inept, insane, thoughtless, foolish, criminal, retarded, and lazy. Their solution was to encourage the capable to breed profligately while removing the worst examples of humanity from the breeding pool.

Without eugenics, they warned, society would quickly degenerate or lose abilities because those abilities were no longer more rewarded than the lack of them. In a world where people had to attend jobs, pay bills, and shop at grocery stores, our competence was not tested, and incompetence was taking over, they warned.

Democracy sneered. Because of the ironist contrarian nature of egalitarianism, the leaders of the day shunned eugenics — especially after WW2 — and insisted on increasing equality instead. Basically, they bought off the problem instead of addressing it.

We might analogize what happened there to a golden hand grenade. The Gods of the Copybook Headings warned that if you pulled the pin, eventually the grenade would detonate. Democracy sneered, yanked the pin, and then said, “See? I’m still here.”

But as it turns out, those who warned of degeneration had a point. We can see the encroaching genetic crisis through an example of degeneration, namely poor eyesight:

The world is facing a growing epidemic of shortsightedness, and the future outcomes are blurry.

If the past 30 years are anything to go by, more than 740 million children and adolescents may struggle to see objects at a distance by 2050, according to new estimates.

The concerning projections are based on a global review, which examined the prevalence of myopia, or shortsightedness, using data collected from 50 nations as recently as 2023.

A century ago fewer people wore glasses or needed them. Since the average person now spends very little time hunting, having bad vision does not impair success. As a result, the genes for shortsightedness have accumulated in the gene pool and now people are increasingly unable to see without vision correction.

The egalitarians will try to blame dim light or spending a lot of time reading, but glasses-wearing often emerges before children can read. Most likely it is genetic in origin, since people who have good eyesight can produce children who do not need glasses.

By the same token, the outbreak of illiteracy will be blamed on social media or current education methods, but is most likely genetic:

In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to…Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it.

When you no longer reward intelligence as much as simply going through school and memorizing enough stuff to fool the exams, the percentage of actually intelligent people drops and they are replaced by the middle of the bell curve. Since this happens across the board, no one notices because they lack the ability.

Tags: degeneration, dunning-kruger effect, eugenics