Who shall survive?

published 1934

The eugenic doctrine, similarly to the technological process, is another promiser of extreme happiness to man. The eugenic dreamer sees in the distant future the human race so changed through breeding that all men will be born well, the world populated with heroes, saints, and Greek gods, and all that accomplished by certain techniques through the elimina­tion and combination of genes. If this should really come to pass the world would be at once glorious, beautiful, and God­ like. But it may be reached at the cost of man as a creator from within himself; it would have, like Siegfried in the myth, a vulnerable spot into which the thorn of death could enter,-a tragic world, a. world in which beauty, heroism, and wisdom are gained without effort, in which the hero is in want of the highest reward, the opportunity to rise from the hum­ blest origin to a supreme level. It sums up to the question whether creation in its essence is finished with conception or whether creation does not continue or cannot be continued by the individual after he is born.
The eugenic dreamer and the technological dreamer have one idea in common: to substitute and hasten the slow process of nature. Once the creative process is encapsuled in a book it is given; it can be recapitulated eternally by everybody without the effort of creating anew. Once a machine for a certain pattern of performance is invented a certain product can be turned out in infinite numbers practically without the effort of man. Once that miraculous eugenic formula will be found a human society will be given at birth perfect and smooth, like a book off the press.