Case History (4th order trope-wrangling)

This is an example of the fourth order of Mundane thought (there’s no hierarchy of people here--just an organization of thought). There’s a goddamn anthology of stories in this concept alone, never mind all the other tropes that need to be called into question.

Racism. A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. [Webster's]

The superman trope in genre. A belief that segments of the human race will evolve traits superior to the rest of the human race.

Do you still not want to question the genre’s use of tropes?

If that isn’t clear to you, consider the case history of John W. Campbell comforting Philip Klass at the end of WWII and the revelation of Jewish concentration camps that Campbell thought the Jews were homo superiorus.

Yeah, but--one might protest--the supermen are usually suppressed by the weaker. True, but isn’t that the reasoning of Nazis who thought themselves superior, that the weaker were financially suppressing the superior?

Do you still not want to question the genre’s use of tropes?

In defense of Campbell, it’s true that the human species has gone through a number of changes. The human brain has grown larger over a half million years, but then the Neaderthals had a larger brain than ours--assuming size matters (they also cared for the sick and buried their dead before we did--shouldn’t such an advanced species be more favored by survival of the fittest?).

Moreover, fifty-years later, a Pulitzer-prize-winning biologist still spoke in terms of superiority via survival of the fittest in a manner like Campbell’s, used perhaps to comfort the superior human species or to comfort the guilt of “inferior” humans:

“It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct.... Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies.... [N]atural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably ben far more ruthless in New Guinea than in the more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more important.... [I]n mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners.”

--Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

I don’t accuse Campbell or Diamond of racism, but their reasoning is perilously problematic as their ideas continue to percolate through society (neither party claims his race superior, but that is unimportant in the above definition of racism; moreover, both attitudes still segregate qualities of peoples). Natural selection tends to select against unfit traits rather than for a trait (creatures taken by disease or the weakest culled by predators). Although some herd species reproduce only with the most fit male (albeit even with some less fit females), many other species simply pair up.

Since the loss of the New Guinea unfit due to wars and murder and hunger are Diamond’s principal methods of selecting for intelligence, I must express some dubiousness that poverty can be necessarily equated with a lack of intelligence. These examples, however, are examples of selection against the unfit.

The problem, of course, is this perpetual notion of progress: that we are superior to our parent’s generation; our SF is better than the previous generations’, our philosophy and religion is better than Aristotle’s and Jesus’. We know better because we’re alive and they’re dead (see? They were unfit).

We do have superior science and technology, but we seldom humbly recall anymore that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Since the intelligent in our enlightened society tend not to reproduce as often, one in favor Darwinian descriptions of human society might conceivably claim that Homo superiorus died long ago.