The Shortest History of Eugenics:
From “Science” to Atrocity – How a Dangerous Movement Shaped the World, and Why It Persists
by Erik Peterson (The Experiment)
The shortest review of The Shortest History of Eugenics is: exactly what it says on the tin.
The book is a history of eugenics, starting with references from ancient history and ending…well, it does not end. The book makes it a point to detail the ways in which eugenics or eugenics-inspired theories exist in contemporary political and social discussion.
It is a brief introduction (I keep wondering if “shortest” is a pun) out of necessity of covering 2,500 years of history. It is also brief because eugenics itself is a protean figure. Think, for instance, if you were writing the history of light. The book could discuss physics, the eye, astronomy, art theory, yet eugenics is still worse for having not only science but pseudoscience.
The author makes a pair of good choices in terms of presenting a satisfying arc. The first is in focusing on biographies of the proponents throughout the years. This helps the reader have something concrete to hold to as the modalities change, and it provides humanization without rationalization.
The second is in stressing the trend of the history from “positive” to “negative.” Not in a moral sense – it is all evil – but in a methodological sense of eugenicists trying to breed “the good” shifting to sterilization or genocide of “the bad.”
Its brevity is weakness and strength. It is necessarily short to be an overview, but at points that becomes elision, for instance in dealing with genetics pre-re-discovery of Mendel (the subject of a great public science series). I am less worried about this in the abstract of the book as foundational education as I am in thinking about where our current supporters of Eugenics or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Eugenics! supporters would criticize the text on. The same goes for some of the melodrama in the writing. It is justified on the basis of the material (contra the chapter titles, where an editor ought to have stepped in [or if an editor did step in, find a new career]), but I feel that the persuasive value is less than the risk of tone policing.
So, while this should be looked at as more of a springboard to further reading, it does not profess to be anything else, and does that job well. The book is a reminder of how far we have not come, how bad so many otherwise decent people were, and as an adjunct to many other intellectual histories that glues ideas together.
My thanks to the author, Erik Peterson, for writing the book, and to the publisher, The Experiment, for making the ARC available to me.
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