Habermas Warns of Genetic Claims that Bolster Xenophobia
He begins with the same troubling events in Germany that Biopolitical Times blogger Pete Shanks referenced recently, triggered by the Social Democratic political figure Thilo Sarrazin's argument that Muslims cannot or will not integrate into Western societies and that Muslim immigration should be cut off. Sarrazin's comments, made in the course of promoting his new book Germany Does Away with Itself, were met with a backlash that forced him to resign his position on the board of the Bundesbank.
Habermas writes that Sarrazin "fuels discrimination against this minority with intelligence research from which he draws false biological conclusions" and that in spite of his forced resignation, his claims "have gained unusually wide publicity" and "popular support." He writes:
The poison that Mr. Sarrazin had released by reinforcing cultural hostility to immigrants with genetic arguments seemed to have taken root in popular prejudices….
One poll found that more than a third of Germans agreed with Mr. Sarrazin's prognosis that Germany was becoming "naturally more stupid on average" as a result of immigration from Muslim countries.
Habermas explicitly rejects the conclusion that Germany is poised to reprise the nightmares of Nazism:
What we are seeing is not a revival of the mentalities of the 1930s. Instead, it is a rekindling of controversies of the early 1990s, when thousands of refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, setting off a debate on asylum seekers…. The problems of today have set off the reactions of yesterday - but not those of the day before.
That Habermas is closely attuned to the implications of misusing genetic explanations for political ends is evident in his 2003 book The Future of Human Nature, which warns against "the biopolitical future prophesied by liberal eugenicists."
Though it attracted surprisingly little attention in the U.S., the book was clearly understood in Europe as a significant political intervention. It issued an urgent call for broader public discourse about the uses of human biotechnologies. Neither philosophers nor citizens, Habermas wrote, "have any good reasons for leaving such a dispute to biologists and engineers intoxicated by science fiction."