| Constructing fictional eugenics |
[Oct. 26th, 2012|11:24 pm]
Scott
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So if you had to design a eugenics program, how would you do it? Be creative.
I'm asking because I'm working on writing about a fictional society that practices eugenics. I want them to be interesting and sympathetic, and not to immediately pattern-match to a dystopia that kills everyone who doesn't look exactly alike.
I can imagine a lot of contrived and not very interesting policies, like only people who get a certain IQ score can reproduce, or criminals can't reproduce, and things like that. But I feel like there should be something more interesting and less obviously "The government is going to subvert this to kill off dissidents, isn't it?" Something that gives eugenics the same kind of "Huh, didn't expect that would work" factor that prediction markets give decision-making, or that public-key cryptography gives security.
Obvious ideas include monetary incentives for "desirables" to have more kids and monetary incentives for "undesirables" to get sterilized. That at least avoids the "forced sterilization" ick factor. But there's still the problem of "soft pressure" or social pressure to conform, especially among the poor who need the money. Plus the government gets to decide who's desirable, which would probably be on sketchy criteria. I want this to look like "Huh, these people are really socially progressive, aside from the whole eugenics thing"
I'm asking "how would you design a eugenics program?" rather than "how should I do this for my conworld" because I find that if I set out to make a constructed world, my creativity suddenly disappears and I risk falling in to the standard "there are elves and dwarves and dragons, but the dragons are called something different! Like draa'ken!" trap. But then when real people try to think up ideas, they come up with fascinating things like prediction markets and seasteading and Mormonism. Or as some sci-fi author once put it, "the average fictional alien race is less genuinely foreign than the average Chinese person".
So I'm less interested in what you think would be a great plot hook involving eugenics and more interested in how you would implement a eugenics program yourself, if for some reason you got put in charge. Let's say in the United States, or Europe, or China if we want somewhere authoritarian enough to have free range. I'm interested in both methods and in goals...what traits do you select for to try to build a better society?
(not really interested in debating the moral good or evil of eugenics here, even though I know it'll come up anyway) |
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