BB-80089 The Siegfried Mating
The Siegfried Mating
Blueboy Library
BB-80089
Chad Stuart
$2.25
Foreword
Darwin theorized that man in his lowest stages was essentially an animal, and the upward progress of man is viewed as effected by natural causes, chief among which is the action of natural selection. His pronouncements were greeted by enraged outbursts by those of us who had long believed we didn’t belong to the rest of nature but stood somehow apart, being a different and superior being.
However, those men who were able to cast aside the assumed insult to their human dignity, sided with Darwin. They accepted this new awareness of their evolutionary origins. They accepted the fact that human behavior does obey the laws of natural causation. They were prepared to cast aside a spiritual pride which had heretofore supported man in his reluctance to accept natural laws as determinants of his own behavior.
Adolph Hitler, as but one in a long line of German leaders, kings, philosophers, and historians, saw life as Darwin saw it: a struggle for survival between the fit and the weak. Hitler, though, was prepared to go one step further.
Natural selection, while Nature’s valid way of eliminating the sick and the weak, was often a tedious and lengthy process, taking hundreds or even thousands of years. If man was indeed an animal, couldn’t he, too, be improved by the more controlled methods of artificial selection, as other animals, specifically livestock, were?
“The German State,” Hitler was to expound in Mein Kampf, “must see to it that only the healthy beget children.”
Why are Hitler’s experiments in eugenics still looked upon with fear and loathing by most of us who hear about them even to this day? Is it a reversion to our ideas that we are really not animals, after all; certainly not animals who can be improved by controlled breeding as are other creatures?
Possibly not. After all, more and more people have come to accept Darwin’s theory. And, who can deny the progress of controlled breeding in other areas of animal husbandry? The practice has given us many improved strains of livestock, each adapted to special conditions and purposes.
Is our fear, then, conjured by a knowledge that success in breeding depends primarily on the skill of the breeder in managing the breeding stock? I think, perhaps, yes. Because, it is the responsibility of the breeder to select those qualities which are desirable for perpetuation in the highest possible degree. It is the responsibility of the breeder to conceive and to comprehend an ideal and to maintain and develop that ideal to its fullest.
And, what exactly were the ideals, the desirable qualities, most appreciated by those who plunged a world into war, astounded nations with the extent of their genocide, advocated the superiority of one bloodline above all others?
That, I think is our main fear. And, that, I think, is also a valid one.
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