One the one hand, it often feels like that. On the other, I'm lucky to have so much help. The graphic is St. Anthony Tormented by Demons by Martin Schongauer, the temptation of said saint having been a favorite subject of artistic contemplation from Bosch to Dali. So after I ran across this image, I naturally hiked over to HighBeam Research to look for additional serving suggestions for "temptation." As I noted here recently, one thing, more often than not, leads to quite another...

from: Good breeding: the eugenics temptation by Amy Laura Hall
source: The Christian Century, 2 November 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research

After he finished his controversial IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation... Black put his research team to work tracing the web of eugenics in the U.S. and abroad. War Against the Weak relates how many groups with prominent board members from the fields of religion, business and government pushed for state laws to sterilize both people on public assistance and those thought likely to breed children who would become wards of the state....

According to Black, two women played crucial roles in the "war against the weak." The grand dame of eugenics was millionaire-widow Mrs. E.H. Harriman. Her aim was clear: to stem the tide of the "defective and delinquent classes." Her motive was fairly transparent: to secure the superiority of wealth.

A different motive fueled the efforts of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. She was drawn to eugenics through her nursing work in the slums of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, where "the oppressive reality of overpopulation and poverty cried out for relief." She viewed the suffering of the urban poor in apocalyptic terms and vowed to usher in a different realm.

As Black relates, Sanger subsequently "embraced the Malthusian notion that a world running out of food supplies should halt charitable works and allow the weak to die off." In her book [The] Pivot of Civilization (1922), Sanger addresses "the cruelty of charity," arguing against the "sinisterly fertile soil" that perpetuates "defectives, delinquents and dependents." Charity "encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it ... a dead weight of human waste."

Even after World War II, Sanger continued to argue for the sterilization of those on public assistance. "Let us not forget that these billions, millions, thousands of people are increasing, expanding, exploding at a terrific rate every year. Africa, Asia, South America are made tip of more than a billion human beings," she admonishes.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race was the book that first got me looking into connections between my then idée fixe -- manifest destiny -- and the social Darwinist translation of this notion into social rather than geographic colonialism. The connection between Margaret Sanger and eugenics is a loaded issue (if not a loaded gun), and is hotly argued by many purported feminists (for an eye-opening alternative take on contemporary feminism by a card-carrying feminist, see Insult to Injury: Rethinking our Responses to Intimate Abuse). Uncomfortable or not, the Sanger-eugenics connection is a matter of fact. While I fully endorse a woman's right to chose, to coin a phrase, I equally endorse her right to know what she's choosing. I don't often quote from National Review -- not my personal cup of tea -- and the following clearly has its own "ax to grind," but it does accurately reflect Edwin Black's superb reporting...

from: Pandora Revisited. (War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race) a book review by Wesley J. Smith
source: National Review, 29 September 2003
via: HighBeam™ Research

One of Black's most interesting sections details Margaret Sanger's close ties to eugenics. Black is a fan of Sanger, believing her to have been a "visionary reformer." He also unequivocally states his support for Planned Parenthood (apparently ignoring that organization's support for late-term eugenic abortion). Thus, he clearly has no "pro-life" ax to grind, no desire to besmirch Sanger's memory. This renders his clear and impeccably documented recitation of Sanger's heartless eugenic beliefs and her tight embrace of social Darwinism -- she opposed charitable efforts to assist the poor and downtrodden -- all the more devastating.

"Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist," he writes, who turned "her otherwise noble birth-control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit, and draconian immigration restrictions." Not only that, but Sanger engaged repeatedly in what today would be labeled hate-speech, referring "to the lower classes and the unfit as 'human waste' not worthy of assistance," and proudly spouting "the extreme eugenic view that human 'weeds' should be 'exterminated.'" Sanger apparently never shed these odious beliefs; Black quotes speeches and comments she made in favor of eugenics as late as 1953.