“I always knew Salazar Slytherin was a twisted old loony,” says Ron Weasley, “but I never knew he started all this pure-blood stuff. I wouldn’t be in his house if you paid me.”
And yet the House of Slytherin has no shortage of new applicants. It’s a Who’s Who of Recent Movie Supervillains, including Magneto, Sebastian Shaw, the Lizard, and the Red Skull. Oh, and Lord Whatshisface minus Ralph Fiennes’ nose. Also, if you don’t mind a little song and dance with your supervillainy, the Broadway Green Goblin. My family only just caught up on the fall season of Syfy’s Alphas, so now I can add Stanton Parish to the list too. He has the best advertising slogan of the batch:
“Better people, Better world.”
The semi-immortal Parish has been honing his PR skills since the Civil War, so he may have cribbed the phrase from Kentucky eugenicists in the 1930s:
“Fewer Babies, Better Babies.”
That was back when contraception was about preventing the unfit from breeding. Or as Margaret Sanger phrased it on a 1921 cover of Birth Control Review: “To Create a race of thoroughbreds.” The American branch of Slytherin House, AKA the Eugenics Society of the United States, was sponsoring national “Fitter Family” contests, with winning families receiving medals inscribed with the slogan: “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” The pamphlet writers over at the Carnegie Institute Department of Genetics were lesser word wizards, but no less dedicated to the cause: “Eugenics Seeks to Improve the Natural, Physical, Mental, and Temperamental Qualities of the Human Family.” Other eugenic poster writers focused on the flipside: “Some people are born to be a burden on the rest.” Ads for The Black Stork, a 1917 documentary about a pediatrician who allowed unfit babies to die, cut to the chase: “Kill Defectives, Save the Nation.” The 1921 Second International Eugenics Conference gave it a scientific-sounding spin:
“Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.”
That means fixing the gene pool through compulsory sterilization, immigration boycotts, anti-miscegenation laws, and what was once euphemistically termed euthanasia, AKA Auschwitz. By losing World War 2, the Nazis largely (though not completely) killed the eugenics movement. All that “pure-blood stuff” would be forever associated with the uber-Aryan Adolf Hitler, AKA Salazar Slytherin.
So why is popular entertainment still waging the war? Lord Voldermort is just the tip of the white hooded iceberg.
Ian McKellen’s Magneto complained that “nature is too slow,” back in the 2000 X-Men. Michael Fassbender’s Magneto was still complaining in the 2011 X-Men: First Class, but under the tutelage of Kevin Bacon: “We are the future of the human race. You and me, son. This world could be ours.” A month later, Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull was giving Captain America the same lesson: “You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind. Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. You could have the power of the gods!”
Last summer, Harry Potter alum Rhys Ifans, AKA Dr. Curt Connors, AKA the Lizard, wanted to “enhance humanity on an evolutionary scale” and “create a world without weakness.” “This is no longer about curing ills,” he assured Peter Parker. “This is about finding perfection.” Unfortunately, “Human beings are weak, pathetic, feeble minded creatures. Why be human at all when we can be so much more? Faster, stronger, smarter!”
Another Spider-Man supervillain sings the same song every night, plus weekend matinees. According to Bono’s Green Goblin, “The crossroads of the world just need a little tweak from a freak.”He studies “enhanced genetics” and “super-human kinetics” to create “new men,” a “new species.” The military only wants a “new breed of Marines,” but the Goblin’s “designer genes” lead him into a much bolder “do it yourself world” in which human beings are the new “masters of creation,” claiming “powers once reserved for the ancient gods.”
This is the song of the Superman. Nietzsche wrote it back in 1883. “Lo, I teach you the Superman!” shouts Nietzsche’s PR man, Zarathustra. “Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. . . .Man is something that is to be surpassed. . . . What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman . . . .”
The Superman was Nietzsche’s answer to the death of God. Who needs Him? We can evolve ourselves. You could argue Nietzsche was writing philosophical allegory, not Aryan supremacy. But once George Bernard Shaw (any relation to Sebastian?) translated “ubermensch” into “superman,” the House of Slytherin was up and singing:
For each of the four founders had
A house in which they mightTake only those they wanted, so,
For instance, Slytherin
Took only pure-blood wizards
Of great cunning just like him.Said Slytherin, “We’ll teach just those
Whose ancestry’s purest.”
Maybe Rowling, like recent screenwriters for the X-Men, Captain America, and Spider-Man, just borrowed eugenics as a boiler plate bad guy. There’s no twisted old loony bigger than Adolf.
But then why did it take till January of this year for my state to introduce the Justice for Victims of Sterilization Act? Virginia was once the cutting edge of eugenics. The future chancellor of Germany admired our 1924 Racial Integrity Act while scribbling Mein Kampf in his prison cell. He used its DNA for the Nazi’s own Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring.
Hitler removed himself from the gene pool in 1945, but Virginia eugenicists kept sterilizing the unfit till 1979. Governor Warner apologized over a decade ago, but only now is the legislature even considering paying for its Death Eater history. The bill limits claims to $50,000 per victim, with an estimated grand total of $76M.
If that sounds like a lot, then imagine living your muggle life under the reign of Voldemort.
Yes, Virginia, there are supervillains. And they don’t come from kids’ books.
Now pass the damn bill.
Eugenics is such a politically odd thing — totally despised in popular depictions, as you say, but hardly ever discussed in political or historical contexts. I guess Hitler just makes people uncomfortable….
The villain in Moonraker was a eugenicist too…that’s why Jaws (with his bad teeth) turned against him….
It’s also a given in so much classic science fiction, from Carson of Venus through Van Vogt (Slan) and Cyril Kornbluth (“The Marching Morons”).
It’s also sobering to reflect that it wasn’t just an ideology of the right. Leftists and progressives such as Sydney & Beatrice Webb, Sanger and Wells were eager proponents.
For an angry but reasoned discussion of eugenics as practiced in America, see Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.
I’m not convinced Red Skull in the Cap movie was into eugenics- he seemed to pretty much want to blow up the world to “be a god”. It seemed to me the filmmakers were uncomfortable with the historical roots of the Captain America character and just wanted a context-less, stock cartoon villain.
Also I suspect characters like the Lizard are better understood as some sort of modern take on traditional folk monsters (Vampires, werewolves, the Big Bad Wolf, etc.) While it wouldn’t surprise me if the film makers put in a reference to genetics, I I’m not sure that’s really at the root of what is going on with those characters.
Isn’t eugenics a rather modern invention? (Though to be fair, the Wikipedia article says it has ancient greek precedents…) But ancient people would have understood the logic of hunter and prey… which seems closer to what the monster characters are about.
Also the fact that the dude is called the GOBLIN might be a hint that’s there’s really some older theme driving the story than eugenics. (Unless, arguing against my point, you want to say per the Wilkipedia article that the ancient romans and greeks practiced eugenics….)
So, I remain a bit skeptical but uncertain. I feel like your argument isn’t really looking at the history of monster characters that drives some of these stories. (It’s harder to argue against Voldemort or Magneto being into eugenics, though Magneto’s motivation changes from movie to movie and comic to comic).
“It’s also sobering to reflect that it wasn’t just an ideology of the right. Leftists and progressives such as Sydney & Beatrice Webb, Sanger and Wells were eager proponents.”
Yeah…I think this is part of why it doesn’t have more of a political profile. Everybody’s embarrassed by it. Pro-life folks’ll occasionally talk about the (extremely uncomfortable) links to abortion rights history and discourse…but even there not as much as you might think.
I don’t think it has to be all one thing. Chris isn’t saying that these films are entirely about eugenics and nothing else; he’s saying that there’s a discourse of eugenics-as-evil which pops up all over the place — often casually and not especially thoughtfully (it’s pop culture, after all) — but casual assumptions in a culture can be interesting/important.
There’s also the uncomfortable fact that some of our contemporary tools for measuring mental aptitude come from eugenics and its advocates (IQ tests, the SAT).
I didn’t know that. It makes sense though. I always thought those tests (especially the IQ test) were despicable and stupid. Good to have my intuition confirmed.
John Byrne’s take on Superman made him a product of Kryptonian eugenics. In his late eighties reboot, a computer matched Jor-El and Lara by their genetics, assuring the production of healthy, physically and mentally ideal offspring. I don’t think it was an endorsement, as his Krypton was decidedly dystopian. I do think it was his explanation for why the lone survivor of a doomed planet wasn’t a superpowered schlub.
Superman was initially conceived as a villain, and influenced by Nietzsche.
No idea why Byrne made Krypton a dystopia, but you can read it as paralleling the creation of the character, something good made from something evil.
“No idea why Byrne made Krypton a dystopia,”
Because the character and the comics he was in were stagnant for decades and decades. Pretty much all the revisions Byrne made were a reaction to that. It was all about bringing back limitations to the character.
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pallas says:
I’m not convinced Red Skull in the Cap movie was into eugenics- he seemed to pretty much want to blow up the world to “be a god”. It seemed to me the filmmakers were uncomfortable with the historical roots of the Captain America character and just wanted a context-less, stock cartoon villain.
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Haven’t seen the movie yet, though we did watch our DVD of the delightful “The Avengers” last night, where Captain America’s old-school virtues and patriotism were nicely retained.
One would reasonably speculate, with HYDRA apparently from Cap’s movie trailers replacing the Nazis as the main threat, that they wanted the Red Skull to be tied in from the first new film with their apolitical villainous organization, which would continue to be a threat in subsequent films set in the present.
Broccoli & Saltzman, the original James Bond movie producers, likewise pushed forth the apolitical SPECTRE to replace Russia’s real-life counterespionage organization, SMERSH (even Rosa Klebb in her filmic appearance was actually working for SPECTRE!), in an unsuccessful effort to get the 007 films distributed in the USSR.
On the subject of eugenics, the Evil Organization in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” TV show was THRUSH; which stands for (no, I didn’t have to Google this) the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. (Not that I recall any shows having eugenics-themed plots.)
In fairness to the Red Skull, in his very first appearance, he was apolitical; a mere bellboy in whom Hitler noted qualities to be nurtured: “You too hate all humanity!” Raising him to power, the Skull immediately set out to carve out his own personal organization. In the Red-baiting 50s, he was made a mere puppet of the Kremlin, though…
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Isn’t eugenics a rather modern invention? (Though to be fair, the Wikipedia article says it has ancient greek precedents…)
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A lioness was observed who, having given birth to a litter of pups, noted that one had deformed paws. She lashed out and killed it.
It makes sense that scarce-resource societies would tend to follow this natural order; sacrificing the physically weak and defective in order that resources be allocated to the more healthy.
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Nate says:
There’s also the uncomfortable fact that some of our contemporary tools for measuring mental aptitude come from eugenics and its advocates (IQ tests, the SAT).
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So? Must the measurement of intelligence or educational achievements be damned? Such testing does not necessarily mean that one must then go on to “eliminate the stupid” thinking, or consider that measurements in certain areas mean that those who score low are therefore losers in every way, forever doomed to be sub-par.
For instance, IQs have been found to be flexible; with brain-deadening tasks such as staying at home and taking care of kids frequently reducing IQs as much as ten points. (As Dave Barry neatly put it, “children make you stupid!”) And Phil Donahue was quite the success in the media despite having a sub-normal IQ of 90.
See http://listverse.com/2011/01/31/top-10-things-the-nazis-got-right/ . Is opposition to vivisection, or being pro-conservation, etc., to be rejected ’cause the Nazis were in favor?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I didn’t know that. It makes sense though. I always thought those tests (especially the IQ test) were despicable and stupid. Good to have my intuition confirmed.
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Oh, the horror of “everybody does not get a gold star” thinking!
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pallas says:
No idea why Byrne made Krypton a dystopia…
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I’d think it was — as with the current trashing of Wonder Woman’s heritage — a trendily “making things ‘dark,’ edgy” move.
My point about SAT and IQ testing wasn’t that it’s bunk because eugenics adherents invented it (though I do think it’s largely bunk, especially when used as anything other than crude measures). My point was that certain legacies of eugenics thinking (such as the notion that intelligence is innate, quantifiable and predicts aptitude) are still with us, which makes it a touchy subject.
Oh yeah; I got that, Nate.
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Nate says:
My point about SAT and IQ testing wasn’t that it’s bunk because eugenics adherents invented it…
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Well, putting it like this earlier…
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There’s also the uncomfortable fact that some of our contemporary tools for measuring mental aptitude come from eugenics and its advocates (IQ tests, the SAT).
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…without any further explanation, certainly gave the wrong impression.
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…My point was that certain legacies of eugenics thinking (such as the notion that intelligence is innate, quantifiable and predicts aptitude) are still with us…
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Certainly, and such are pernicious and distorted, oversimplified attitudes. (See the vile bestseller “The Bell Curve” as an example.)
A for “eugenics adherents invent[ing the] SAT and IQ testing”:
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Alfred Binet and the First IQ Test
During the early 1900s, the French government asked psychologist Alfred Binet to help decide which students were mostly likely to experience difficulty in schools. The government had passed laws requiring that all French children attend school, so it was important to find a way to identify children who would need specialized assistance…
This first intelligence test, referred to today as the Binet-Simon Scale, became the basis for the intelligence tests still in use today. However, Binet himself did not believe that his psychometric instruments could be used to measure a single, permanent and inborn level of intelligence (Kamin, 1995). Binet stressed the limitations of the test, suggesting that intelligence is far too broad a concept to quantify with a single number. Instead, he insisted that intelligence is influenced by a number of factors, changes over time and can only be compared among children with similar backgrounds (Siegler, 1992).
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Emphasis added; more at http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm
And, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet , we see
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Binet was forthright about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates and could be influenced by the environment; therefore, intelligence was not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be found in children with comparable backgrounds (Siegler, 1992). Given Binet’s stance that intelligence testing was subject to variability and was not generalizable, it is important to look at the metamorphosis that mental testing took on as it made its way to the U.S.
While Binet was developing his mental scale, the business, civic, and educational leaders in the U.S. were facing issues of how to accommodate the needs of a diversifying population, while continuing to meet the demands of society. There arose the call to form a society based on meritocracy (Siegler,1992) while continuing to underline the ideals of the upper class. In 1908, H.H. Goddard, a champion of the eugenics movement, found utility in mental testing as a way to evidence the superiority of the white race. After studying abroad, Goddard brought the Binet-Simon Scale to the United States and translated it into English.
Following Goddard in the U.S. mental testing movement was Lewis Terman, who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The new Standford-Binet scale was no longer used solely for advocating education for all children, as was Binet’s objective. A new objective of intelligence testing was illustrated in the Stanford-Binet manual with testing ultimately resulting in “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency…
It follows that we should question why Binet did not speak out concerning the newfound uses of his measure. Siegler (1992) pointed out that Binet was somewhat of an isolationist in that he never traveled outside of France and he barely participated in professional organizations. Additionally, his mental scale was not adopted in his own country during his lifetime and therefore was not subjected to the same fate. Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct (White, 2000).
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However, the SAT, developed in America, featured racist ideological views from the get-go. From “History of the SAT: A Timeline”:
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1905
Invention of the IQ [Test]
A French psychologist, Alfred Binet, is credited with inventing the first IQ test, a test that could measure one’s intelligence. Binet’s intent was to identify slow learners by determining their mental ages.
World War I
Experimentation with army IQ Test
During the first World War, IQ testing advances greatly when Robert Yerkes, a Harvard professor, persuaded the army to let him administer IQ tests to nearly two million recruits. Yerkes wants to use tests to choose officer candidates and help the IQ movement build up a record of statistical evidence. The resulting Alpha and Beta tests mark the first time an IQ test has mass results. The goal of IQ testers is to select the most intelligent people of society, not necessarily to reform education.
1923-1926
Carl Brigham invents the SAT
Carl C. Brigham, who worked with Yerkes on the Army IQ tests, publishes a book, A Study of American Intelligence, on the results. Brigham’s book analyzes the findings by race and concludes that American education is declining “and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.”
Around this time, Brigham also administers his own objective version of the Army test to Princeton freshmen as well as to applicants to Cooper Union, an all-scholarship technical college in New York City. The College Board then puts him in charge of a committee to develop a test that could be used by a wider group of schools. This test becomes the SAT. In 1926 the SAT is administered to high school students for the first time.
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/where/timeline.html
Regardless, that its creator analyzed the findings by race, and considered “racial mixture” a societal threat, does not necessarily translate into making all the SAT’s findings worthy of dismissal.
What makes SAT’s worthy of dismissal is that they’re pretty easy to score high on if you get lots of prep and fairly difficult to score high on if you don’t. Between the high number of near perfect scores (thanks Kaplan!) and the weak correlation between SAT’s and actual performance after admission a lot of Universities are trying to figure out how to do away with it.
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Nate says:
What makes SAT’s worthy of dismissal is that they’re pretty easy to score high on if you get lots of prep and fairly difficult to score high on if you don’t.
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Wouldn’t those taking most any test score higher if they had plenty of preparation, lower than if they don’t? Are we to dismiss any test where that situation holds true?
As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT explains, “The test is intended to assess a student’s readiness for college”; “The College Board states that SAT measures literacy and writing skills that are needed for academic success in college.”
What’s so objectionable about that?
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Between the high number of near perfect scores (thanks Kaplan!) and the weak correlation between SAT’s and actual performance after admission a lot of Universities are trying to figure out how to do away with it.
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This study comes out “Pro SAT,” although that it was financed by the College Board might understandably make one be suspicious: http://chronicle.com/article/Study-Finds-Link-Between-SAT/134406/
The article at points out that the supposed “weak correlation between SAT’s and actual performance after admission” factor is complicated by…
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…an interesting, but seldom noted statistical reason: Colleges usually accept students from a fairly narrow swath of the SAT spectrum.
The SAT scores of students at elite schools, say, are considerably higher, on average, than those of students at community colleges, yet both sets of students probably have similar college grade distributions at their respective institutions.
If both sets of students were admitted to elite schools or both sets attended community colleges, there would be a considerably stronger correlation between SATs and college grades at these schools.
Those schools that attract students with a wide range of SAT scores generally have higher correlations between the scores and first-year grades.
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Emphasis added; more at http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=98373&page=1
I scored exceptionally well on my SAT tests (despite getting zero academic support from anyone, ever), but nobody in school or family bothered to inform my mother or me that there existed these things called “scholarships,” for which I would easily have qualified. Rather than burden my financially-strapped “single parent” with college tuition expenses (though she offered to take them on), I chose not to go.
Therefore, my case could be used as an attack upon the SAT: “He scored high on the test, but his ‘academic success in college’ was nonexistent!”
At http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/29/the-correlation-between-income-and-sat-scores/ , we read: “Today is the first day of school at the college where I teach, so I thought it would be a nice time to re-post this oldie-but-goodie on the relationship between income and SAT scores. I’m sure all of our students are brilliant, of course, but whether the SAT measures intelligence fairly is up for debate.”
A predictable misinterpretation; the SAT is not an intelligence test, but one which measures (as noted earlier) “a student’s [academic and skill-based] readiness for college.”
The piece goes on:
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it is certainly true that children with more economic resources, on average, end up better prepared for standardized tests. They tend to have better teachers, more resource-rich educational environments, more educated parents who can help them with school and, sometimes, expensive SAT tutoring.
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Indeed so! But does that then mean we should “dumb down” the test to make it fair, pretend that if we skew the questions around, somehow those kids with educationally deprived backgrounds whom the re-jiggered questions will get into college, would then do just as well as those who came from privilege?
Personally, I’d rather divert billions from bailing out crooked/incompetent financiers toward massively improving education opportunities and facilities for the underprivileged. That they may thereby score high; not because of question-twisting, but because they authentically achieved skill in “literacy and writing skills that are needed for academic success in college.”
Alas, will never happen; American society would rather give charity for the reckless rich than luckless poor.
I test well and was able to make high grades in high school and a high score on the SAT without much real academic discipline or study skills. In college, I learned that those who had struggled more were in some ways better prepared.