ABSTRACT
Yet the fascination does remain for a number of people, especially those known as transhumanists, who see a “scientifically organized” society not as dangerous but as inevitable and beneficial. In Eugenics: A Reassessment, for instance, Richard Lynn anticipates the rise of “The new eugenics [that] consists of the use of human biotechnology to achieve eugenic objectives,” and predicts that “at some point in the twenty-first century eugenics will once again become accepted as a desirable and legitimate objective of public policy” (viii, 274-75). Ultimately, as far as his prediction goes, “China assumes world domination and establishes a world eugenic state,” and Lynn characterizes this possibility not as “an unattractive future” but “as the inevitable result of Francis Galton’s (1909) prediction … that ‘the nation which first subjects itself to a rational eugenic discipline is bound to inherit the earth’” (320). What Lynn calls “the inevitable result” could mean to R.C.W. Ettinger “the indefinite improvability of mankind and of men, through eugenics and euthenics techniques” (284). Announcing that “man is an accident, not only his body but his psyche a patchwork of makeshift adaptive compromises,” Ettinger, who is often credited with conceptualizing transhumanism in his Man into Superman, published in 1972, urges, “We must remake ourselves” (21, 22). “Superman,” an enhanced version of mankind in the future, “will be built in several ways,” the first of which is, he announces, by “manipulation of germ plasm before conception, which is genetic engineering in the most straightforward sense” (294).4 Combined with
2 Observing that “It was a mixture, or better, an amalgam of science, politics, and Weltanschauung (ideology or religion) that culminated in the project of the final solution of the Jewish question, or the Holocaust,” Benno Műller-Hill thus argues, “human genetics and eugenics in Germany turned into a religion and a religious cult” (43, 48).
