This blog post examines how we can respond to the discrimination and inequality issues that eugenics and scientism could bring to future society.
Looking back at human history, we see that discrimination has always existed. Slavery, feudalism, racism, gender discrimination, as well as academic background, academic factions, money, status, skin color, religion, and countless other factors have served as criteria to divide people into superior and inferior groups. The film ‘Gattaca’ also shows us the discrimination that could arise in a future society. It is discrimination resulting from eugenics. Eugenics is the study of various conditions and factors aimed at genetically improving the human race. In other words, it involves genetically enhancing the genetic information of unborn fetuses, creating discrimination against children born without such enhancement from the moment they are born.
Vincent Freeman, the protagonist of ‘Gattaca’, is born through natural conception in an era where it is commonplace to be born with only superior genetic traits through genetic manipulation. In the era of this film, a person’s genetic makeup allows for the precise prediction of diseases they will suffer from, their talents, and even their lifespan, all determined at birth. Therefore, genetic testing itself becomes the qualification and determines one’s identity. It is a society where even the outcome of a job interview is determined solely by possessing superior genetic traits. In reality, our laws are designed to prevent discrimination between those with inferior genes and those with superior genes. However, in the film, these laws are rendered useless; individuals are scored based on their genes from birth, and this scoring divides them into classes.
In this society, Vincent Freeman relentlessly strives to become an astronaut, his lifelong dream. Yet, born with inferior genes, he could never achieve this goal. Despite possessing physical abilities superior to those born with superior genes through genetic manipulation, he was denied even the opportunity to pursue his dream.
This film reveals the perils of eugenics. Human beings face discrimination from birth due to a scientism that threatens not only humanity but even divine authority. Moreover, this gap remains unbridgeable no matter how hard one strives throughout life.
At first glance, eugenics appears to have many positive aspects. As eugenics advances, genetic counseling could enable disease prevention, early detection, and treatment. This would reduce the number of children born with disabilities and eliminate hereditary diseases passed down from parents.
However, eugenics carries the risk of falling into self-superiority if mishandled. Ultimately, eugenics is a discipline aimed at preserving individuals with superior genes within society. Consequently, if social leaders or those in power embrace eugenics, they may seek to exclude those deemed socially inferior. Such cases appear throughout history.
The harms of eugenics can be seen in the examples of the United States and Germany. The United States faced significant challenges with racial issues from the late 19th century, when eugenics first emerged. Those holding political and economic power in America were Anglo-Saxons who had migrated from Britain. However, as the numbers of other races grew, the Anglo-Saxons gradually became aware of their own identity and began to reject other races. They believed other races possessed different cultures and customs. They also believed that other races were rapidly spreading mental deficiency, crime, prostitution, and alcoholism within American society. Americans who lived through World War I believed the Anglo-Saxon race needed to further improve its quality to win large-scale international wars. They came to think that mixing their blood with other races would cause racial degeneration. Consequently, they easily passed laws in several states permitting forced sterilization. Under these laws, immigrants deemed eugenically inferior were secretly sterilized within institutions housing the mentally ill, unemployed, and vagrants.
In Germany, after the Nazis came to power in 1933, a political movement rapidly developed that racially categorized and deemed inferior people of African descent, Jews, and Eastern Europeans. They passed forced sterilization laws targeting individuals with congenital mental illness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, congenital blindness, and severe alcoholism. This law was expanded in 1937 to include all children of color in Germany, resulting in approximately 350,000 people having their reproductive capacity removed by the end of the Nazi era. They implemented not only forced sterilization but also euthanasia programs. Beginning with the murder of children with physical and mental disabilities in the late 1930s, it eventually expanded into a mass extermination program targeting healthy adults of other ethnic groups. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Poland, countless Jews, Gypsies, and mentally ill individuals were shot to death under this program. Ultimately, an unprecedented tragedy in human history unfolded: millions of innocent lives were mass-murdered with poison gas in concentration camps, deemed worthless as laborers, sick, or antisocial.
The cases in the United States and Germany occurred at a time when eugenics was not yet sufficiently developed scientifically. That is, it was an era before the manipulation of human genetic information was possible, so inferior individuals were eliminated through sterilization or death. Therefore, some might argue that in a scientifically advanced future, when we can manipulate all genes, such tragedies will not occur. Proponents of eugenics claim the concept has changed significantly from the past. While past eugenics aimed to improve the genetic traits of the entire population, they say new eugenics targets treating individual genetic diseases or enhancing traits. That is, whereas parents who spread genes were the targets of eugenics in the past, now the unborn child is the target. Therefore, the possibility of past-like tragedies occurring is nonexistent, and abortion, gene therapy, or trait enhancement of the fetus is possible based on the voluntary decision of individual families.
However, as mentioned earlier, this advanced eugenics also creates fundamental discrimination among humans. It results in a life where everything is predetermined from birth. Such a society will further exacerbate the rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer phenomenon, creating a gap that cannot be bridged by effort alone, ultimately leading to far greater social inequality than exists today. Children born without genetic manipulation, even if not killed, would become marginalized and effectively buried within society. A society where everything is determined at birth by parents, whether by choice or circumstance, would pose not only discriminatory issues but also significant moral dilemmas.
