In Abrahamic religions, it is God who selects the Wheat from the Chaff. As Nietzsche put it, “the ruling caste of the future … must now take the place of God … They deliver the physiologically botched by teaching them the doctrine of ‘swift death’”(Nietzsche, 1911, p. 266).
Eugenics was a science-religion launched by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, in 1883. Galton suggested that the science of heredity could be combined with animal breeding techniques to steer evolution and create ‘master-minds’ (Galton, 1865).
It was embraced by its followers as an evolutionary religion (Galton, 1909, p. 42), which would replace homo sapiens with a ‘new born Apollo’ (Pearson, 1930, p. 217).
Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel, Brave New World, is frequently read an anti-eugenic dystopian satire. However, his essays from the late 1920s and early 1930s show the extent to which he supported the sort of caste-based scientific-eugenic dictatorship proposed in Brave New World. He promoted eugenic policies from the 1920s until his death in 1962 as a means of lowering the quantity and raising the quality of the population.
Scientists would be the priests of this new religion, measuring and quantifying the value of humans through psychometric and biometric tests to sort the superior from the inferior, discouraging those deemed ‘unfit’ from breeding at all (negative eugenics) through voluntary or involuntary sterilization, segregation, racial miscegenation laws and, at its most extreme, euthanasia, or mass murder (Bashford and Levine, 2010). This ‘jehad or Holy War’ (Galton, 1909, p. 99) would save civilization from being swamped by imbeciles (Huxley, 1994, p. 150).
Published 2017:
