[waterbadger]

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to imply that they are the same. As a Catholic we don’t condone artificial birth control (or believe in divorce!) so it’s very different than the general 20th century perspective on things.

I do think it is important to historically understand where things most people take for granted come from because sometimes it can be pretty eye-opening.

There are many aspects of the modern world (birth control and related issues are just one) that were invented by people with intentions I think 90% of people would strongly disagree with if the they understood them.

[eesmith]

You said "Birth control is also rooted in eugenics." That is a tough argument to make.

Eugenics and birth control have been around for a very long time. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Origin_and_developmen... .

Galton, an early eugenicist, coined the term in 1883. I'll use ~1880 as the start date for that strain of eugenics.

The history of birth control page points out "The Malthusian League was established in 1877 and promoted the education of the public about the importance of family planning and advocated for the elimination of penalties against the promoters of birth control.[38] It was initially founded during the "Knowlton trial" of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh in July 1877"

It also points out how "In the United States, contraception had been legal throughout most of the 19th century, but in the 1870s the Comstock Act and various state Comstock laws outlawed the distribution of information about safe sex and contraception and the use of contraceptives".

Which means birth control, and family planning, predate Galton, so cannot be rooted in eugenics, in the way you likely mean "eugenics" to mean.

Modern statistics was invented by eugenicists and "race scientists", like Galton.

[waterbadger]

Uh, I would consider something called the “Malthusian League” close enough to eugenics from my point of view.

But you are right, birth control itself predates modern era eugenics. What I meant was “modern” birth control.

A lot of the people who have shaped this cultural stuff are just very disturbed. In the past they were pretty open about their perspective before talking about it openly became somewhat taboo. As an example of the “Malthusian mindset” in 1954:

Nuclear scientist Harrison Brown publishes his book "The Challenge of Man’s Future". In the book Brown examines carefully the probability that the human carrying capacity of the planet is between 50 and 200 billion people, before summarizing the reasons this fact is best kept secret:

“If humanity had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.”

Here is the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” by the way if you are interested in why the Church considers birth control to be harmful:

https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...

[eesmith]

What informs your view? Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_League doesn't sound anything like the eugenics movement.

Modern birth control started in the mid 20th century with the combined oral contraceptive pill. Rice-Wray, from what I can tell, saw it as a way for poor families to be able to voluntarily plan the number of children they have.

I don't see how that's informed by eugenics.

What do you see as "eugenics"?

What do you see as '"modern" birth control'?

> As an example of the “Malthusian mindset” in 1954

"Malthusian" has multiple meanings. The Malthusian League Wikipedia entry says: "The organisation maintained that it was concerned about the poverty of the British working class and held that over-population was the chief cause of poverty".

This is in accord with what Malthus wrote. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Early_history , Mathus' "criticism of the working class's tendency to reproduce rapidly, and his belief that this, rather than the exploitation of their labour by capitalists, led to their poverty, brought widespread criticism of his theory."

The Malthusianism page goes on to quote: "Though Malthusianism has since come to be identified with the issue of general over-population, the original Malthusian concern was more specifically with the fear of over-population by the dependent poor"

You quoting someone in 1954 doesn't mean it's the same as the goals of the Malthusian League some 80 years previous.

I have so many disagreements with the position of the Catholic church - sex outside of marriage, sex by teens, abortion, the role of women in the church, gay marriage, co-habitation, and so much more - that I don't see the point of trying to understand its official views of birth control.

[waterbadger]

If you get into the history of the late 19th century through the mid 20th century there is a pretty clear thread you can draw through:

- industrialization

- racial theories about immigrants

- birth control

- the birth of compulsory education (i.e. you must send your children to school to be “Americanized” or the police will arrest you)

- eugenics

- wealthy industrialists trying to consolidate their hold on power politically and economically through developing ways to control “the lower classes” through the “scientific management” of society.

Much of this involved domestic propaganda campaigns beginning in the early 20th century that the instigators were very open about at the time. Many prominent figures were also very explicit about using compulsory education as a tool to form a stratified society that would prevent “the poor” from being a threat to the utopian and “racially pure” world they wanted to build.

For example in 1901 Edward Ross published his book "Social Control" in which he states:

“Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media.. ..the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School.... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.”

Or in 1919 Arthur Calhoun published his "Social History of the Family" in which he describes how the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He also predicted that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit."

Where did the idea of eugenics come from? What other ideas were popular at the time that made it appealing to so many people?

From what I’ve studied about the time period, all this stuff, including eugenics and birth control, came from a literally racist and fairly deranged view of the world. They are all symptoms of the same mindset.

Large families are a powerful safety net for its members. When those families break down what happens? You have isolated and economically vulnerable individuals that are much easier to exploit and manipulate.

I understand that a random person on the internet probably isn’t going to change your mind about the Catholic church for many potential reasons.

That being said, I would argue that the Catholic church safeguards literally the only rationally consistent and ethically sound perspective of reality that we have.

There are teachings of the Church that are difficult to follow but, for the most part, that is because our modern world has organized itself around hedonism instead of loving God, serving God, and cultivating virtue.

As most people understood for thousands of years: cultivating virtue is actually the only path to the true freedom in life most people are looking for. Without pursuit of virtue the only alternative is to grow in slavery to a variety of hedonistic appetites.

To paraphrase St. Augustine:

The virtuous man is free even if he is a slave, the unvirtuous man is a slave even if he is a king.

[eesmith]

My main concern is to show that "Birth control is also rooted in eugenics" is false.

I think I have done that.

Eugenics requires birth control, but there's a long history of birth control for family planning reasons which predates eugenics. Because sex is fun, while having another screaming baby might not be so fun.

I do not think your understanding comes from a solid reading of history. I think your primary source contains dubious scholarship, which you accept with too much trust.

In addition to my earlier comment, the Calhoun misquote you just now gave also comes from 'An Underground History Of American Education' by John Taylor Gatto. https://archive.org/details/AnUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd...

1) Just by reading the quote, it's suspicious because how does someone from 1901 use the term "mass media", which wasn't coined until 1923? https://www.etymonline.com/word/mass-media#etymonline_v_5420... .

Here is Ross's 1901 book "Social Control", https://archive.org/details/socialcontrolas04rossgoog/page/n... (it's a collection of a series of articles he previous published, also under the name 'Social Control').

It does not use the terms "media", and uses the term "medium" only twice, neither referring to communications media.

2) The only place I can find the quote "church with propaganda, education, and mass media" is from Gatto's book. The few other sources which mention it, including "The Atlantean Conspiracy" (described as "the ultimate encyclopedia exposing the global conspiracy from Atlantis to Zion") pretend to quote the original source but are actually quoting Gatto.

We know this because a) the quote is identical, b) it includes 'mass media', which doesn't exist in Ross, and c) the only place Ross uses 'propaganda' is "Dr. Holmes, a delicate humorist, seemed born to preach the propaganda of the clean shirt" at https://archive.org/details/socialcontrolas04rossgoog/page/n...

3) Further, "plastic lumps of human dough" is a misquote. The actual text from Ross is:

> The schooling of the young is a long-headed device to promote order, and does not get adopted till the group wakes up. At first it is the rare thinker who sees anything in it, and his arguments do not always prevail. Down to the Reformation, only the Greek philosophers and the Jewish rabbis had set forth the possibilities of education in respect to social order. Men trust the policeman and the priest sooner than the pedagogue. To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board, exhibits a faith in the power of suggestion which few peoples ever attain to. And so it happens that the rôle of the schoolmaster in the social economy is just beginning. The technique of belief and religion has been understood for thousands of years; but the technique of education is the discovery of yesterday— or, shall I say, to-morrow?

This quote is now a simile, not a metaphor, and it refers to the young, not "people".

Anyone using "People are only little plastic lumps" are copying from Gatto's misquote, and not using Ross's original work.

> From what I’ve studied about the time period

What you've studied appears to one book containing many errors, and publications by the Catholic Church.

You are absolutely correctly that eugenics was a mainstream component of educated, white, well-off progressive thought in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and nearly all of them white supremacists and firm believers in male patriarchy.

That does not mean everything from that time period came from "the same mindset", as you claim without any evidence.

Birth control is a tool. The mindset comes in how you use the tool.

One mindset says it should not be used at all. That is your mindset.

Another mindset says it should be voluntary, for example, as part of family planning by informed adults. That is my mindset.

A third says it should be involuntarily - the state should mandate birth control and use it to weed out certain characteristics. That is the mindset of the negative eugenicism that Sanger was opposed to.

You can believe the latter two are the same mindset, but you don't have the evidence. Well, in a way they are, if the mindset is "don't follow the teaching of the Catholic Church".

> compulsory education

In the US, compulsory education started in Massachusetts during the colonial era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_School_Laws , made a universal requirement in the state by 1852.

You mean, I suspect, national compulsory education.

There are enough lies and mistruths about the history of the US education system that I don't want to wade into that muck.

> that is because our modern world has organized itself around hedonism instead of loving God

Hahahahah! And Satan sits on the throne in Rome, spreading lies as the anti-pope.

And the halls of Shinto temples are full of hedonism.

I am an atheist. The Catholic Church is a male supremacist organization, and I am a feminist. I have no interest in understanding the haberdashery behind the Emperor's new clothes that don't even exist.

Besides the poor scholarship in Gatto's citations, another problem in depending on Gatto as your main source is that Gatto has blind spots. Take:

> In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

IMO, that's cherry picking the conclusion that there is a 'temple of schooling.' I believe "gifted" set up to give better schooling to middle-class white students at a time education was forced to be integrated. For example, at the time Gatto was teaching, and quoting https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220620.2022.20... :

] The implementation of gifted programmes in the 1970s provided a way for school divisions to circumvent many of the aims of desegregated schooling as called for in Brown v. Board of Education. This study examines the implementation of one such system in a Southern school district that saw schools close rather than integrate in the years preceding the founding of a segregated gifted programme known as Quest. Additionally, the study situates the founding of this gifted programme in a national social and legal context involving fears of educational stagnation and white flight from public school systems. Using primary and secondary sources, this study highlights the attitudes of national policymakers at work in the 1974 reauthorization of ESEA, which significantly limited school divisions abilities to integrate while also providing funds for gifted classrooms that segregated ‘exceptional’ children using racially and socioeconomically biased measures.

The idea of the white race is indeed a myth, and one which needs to die. And it's also a myth concerning social control - the myth that whites need to be in charge! But Gatto doesn't see it.

Now I'm going back to my hedonistic lifestyle of re-implementing 40 year old code.

[waterbadger]

Good luck on your code!

I do appreciate your research and willingness to have a conversation.

I think to some degree you yourself are cherry picking isolated data points and taking them out of context to support your point. It’s a straightforward approach to rhetorically defend your perspective and of course I’m guilty of doing the same thing.

The only reason I’m bringing it up is just to say: history happens in a context. Ideas don’t come out of a vacuum. It’s really important not to take something like “birth control” (or “atheism” for that matter) at face value without trying to understand the genesis of those concepts in society and the motivations of the people who made them a standard part of the modern world.

I really do appreciate your corrections and I don’t want to be presenting misinformation. Obviously that just discredits any points I would try to make.

I didn’t present a very solid case that “birth control is rooted in eugenics” and you had fair rebuttals for the points that I made. Granted, even if I personally lack the ability to make the argument clearly that doesn’t mean that it’s not true. But I understand that you don’t have any reason to think it’s true and that’s ok.

I would say that there is a fourth mindset to add to your taxonomy which is: not to mandate birth control but to attempt to achieve the same goal by dishonestly manipulating people into choosing to use birth control who would not otherwise have used it. This is what I believe has happened on a mass scale.

I used to be an atheist too! I grew up with people that are still atheists.

I also grew up in a relatively anti-Christian environment and picked up a lot of negative assumptions about Christianity that in hindsight don’t make much sense.

My experience of being an atheist is that it was the most dogmatic and intellectually dishonest view of the world I have encountered. What I mean by that is that there is a dogmatic “orthodoxy” you are required to believe that makes numerous truth claims about reality (and morality) without sufficient evidence.

Ironically it always ultimately falls back on social proof instead of empiricism (i.e. “well no one else thinks that” or ad hominem attacks) and members are not permitted to ask reasonable questions that do not support atheist dogma.

It was a horrible, oppressive and depressing way to understand myself and the world around me.

Now, despite making extraordinary claims about reality and God’s intervention in the world the Catholic church is actually the most intellectually honest culture that I have ever been a part of (and there are literally thousands of years of sincere, good hearted and intellectually honest geniuses you can learn from).

Catholicism is not the same as any Protestant christianity you might have encountered. The Protestant reformation and the “Enlightenment” both split from the Church at around the same time and each rejected 3 basic claims about reality that the Catholic church holds to be true (this is why Protestant christianity and atheism both have to rely on assertions of dogma to maintain their views):

1. Man is an intelligent and morally accountable agent

2. The world around us is fundamentally intelligible (because we are intelligent)

3. Everything in the world has a “telos” meaning a purpose that it is directed towards.

This might seem irrelevant to your life but if you want to be self-aware and moral about your behavior and beliefs this kind of stuff becomes essential. I guarantee that “thinking what most people believe is true” is not actually an effective compass in that regard.

I wish you all the best and I hope you apply your willingness to seek the truth in a consistent manner!