This article discusses the discrimination and inequality that eugenics will cause in the future society through the movie ‘ Gattaca,’ and warns about the dangers of scientific universalism and the moral problems it causes, using the harmful effects of eugenics in history as an example.
Throughout human history, discrimination has always existed. Slavery, feudalism, racism, gender discrimination, as well as education, class, money, status, skin color, religion, and many other things have been the basis for separating the superior from the inferior. The movie ‘ Gattaca ‘ also shows us the kind of discrimination that could happen in the future society. It is discrimination as a result of eugenics. Eugenics is the study of various conditions and factors for the purpose of genetically improving the human race. In other words, the genetic information of a fetus that hasn’t even entered the world is improved to be superior, and the child is differentiated from the unimproved child at birth.
“Vincent Freeman, the protagonist of ‘Gattaca’, is born through natural conception in an era when it has become commonplace for people to be born with only genes of superior traits through genetic manipulation. In the era of this movie, it is possible to know exactly what diseases a person will suffer from, what they are talented at, and even how long they will live through their genes as soon as they are born. Thus, genetic testing becomes an entitlement in itself, determining identity. We live in a society where even job interviews are decided on the basis of a superior set of genes. In real life, our laws are designed to ensure that there is no discrimination between those with inferior genes and those with superior genes. In the movie, however, these laws are useless, and people are scored based on their genes from birth, which creates a class system.
In this society, Vincent Freeman works tirelessly to fulfill his dream of becoming an astronaut, but because he was born with inferior genes, he could never become one. Even though he was born with superior physical abilities to those born through genetic manipulation, he was never given the chance to fulfill his dream.
Through this movie, we can feel the harm of eugenics. Humans are discriminated against from birth due to scientific universalism that threatens not only human but also divine authority, and this gap cannot be closed even after a lifetime of hard work.
At first glance, eugenics seems to have many positive aspects. Eugenics will allow for the prevention, early detection, and treatment of diseases through genetic counseling. Fewer children would be born with disabilities, and genetic diseases inherited from parents would be eliminated.
However, eugenics can also lead to eugenics if done incorrectly. Eugenics is a science that seeks to leave society with more people with superior genes, so if it is embraced by social leaders or people in positions of power, they will seek to exclude social inferiors. We’ve seen examples of this throughout history.
The harmful effects of eugenics can be seen in the cases of the United States and Germany. The United States has been struggling with racial issues since the late 19th century, when eugenics began to emerge. The people who held political and economic power in the United States were Anglo-Saxons who immigrated from England. However, as the number of other races grew, Anglo-Saxons became increasingly aware of their own identity and began to reject other races. They believed that other races had cultures and customs that were different from their own, and they believed that other races were causing the rapid spread of mental illness, crime, prostitution, and alcoholism into American society. After World War I, Americans believed that Anglo-Saxons needed to further improve the quality of their race in order to win a major international war. The Anglo-Saxons came to believe that mixing their blood with the blood of other races would lead to racial degeneration. As a result, they easily passed laws in several states authorizing forced sterilization. These laws allowed sterilization to be performed covertly on immigrants deemed eugenically inferior in institutions that housed the mentally ill, unemployed, and vagrants.
In Germany, after the Nazis came to power in 1933, political movements that racially segregated and inferiorized blacks, Jews, and Eastern Europeans rapidly developed. They passed forced sterilization laws targeting people with congenital mental illness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, congenital blindness, and severe alcoholism. The law was extended to all German children of color in 1937, and by the end of the Nazi era, an estimated 350,000 people had been sterilized. In addition to forced sterilization, they also implemented euthanasia programs. What began in the late 1930s with the killing of children with physical and mental disabilities eventually expanded into a program of extermination of healthy adults of other races. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Poland, large numbers of Jews, Gypsies, and mentally ill people were shot by the program. The end result was a tragedy unprecedented in human history, where millions of innocent people were mass murdered with lethal gas in concentration camps for being unable to work, sick, or antisocial.
The examples of the United States and Germany occurred at a time when eugenics was not yet scientifically advanced enough to manipulate human genetic information, so inferior people were eliminated through sterilization or death. Some might argue that in the future, when we are able to manipulate every gene, such tragedies will not occur. Proponents of eugenics argue that the concept of eugenics is very different from the past. While the old eugenics was aimed at improving the genetic traits of the entire population of a society, the new eugenics is aimed at treating genetic diseases or enhancing the traits of individuals. In other words, while the parents who would spread their genes were the targets of eugenics in the past, it is now the children who will be born. Therefore, there is no possibility of such a catastrophe, and it is possible to abort, gene-treat, or enhance the traits of a fetus based on the voluntary decision of an individual family.
However, as I mentioned earlier, this development of eugenics also leads to fundamental human discrimination. It creates a life where everything is determined at birth. Such a society would exacerbate the phenomenon of the haves and have-nots, creating a gap that can never be bridged through hard work, and social inequality would be even greater than it is now. Children born without genetic manipulation will be marginalized and buried, if not killed. A society where everything is determined at birth by the parents, willingly or unwillingly, is not only discriminatory but also morally problematic.
