Eugenics in Canada: Forthcoming book by journalist historian

I am pleased to announce that a friend will be writing a book on the Alberta eugenics program in Canada (= why the world will be a better place if the government decides who can and can't have children*). Jane Harris Zsovan's publisher is the excellent Gord Shillingford of J. Gordon Shillingford Publications of Winnipeg, who kindly published my own first book, Faith@Science, a collection of my faith and science writings, in 2001.

I wrote to Jane to say congratulations and,

Yours is a needed book, I think.

Right now, the world is jam packed FULL of false knowledge.

I hope your book on the Alberta eugenics program will help people revisit how false knowledge gets started and how it motors along on the success of its own dissemination - not on its inherent relation to reality - and how much damage it can do.

I faced a very difficult dinner recently with a purveyor of tons of false knowledge. An atheist who makes a big deal out of challenging religion from a tenured position in a religious college - whoop, whoop.

I don't mean to be vulgar, but false knowledge was dropping off him like fleas off a cat who has just been bathed in "De Fleas Flee!" cat soap.

False knowledge is NOT harmless. People differ greatly in social power. When those who have the power are afflicted with false knowledge, those who don't have power must beware. Hence eugenics.

In my experience, lots of false knowledge gets batted from one lazy textbook author to another, so the purveyor of false knowledge thinks that the number of times the nonsense is repeated in his hearing makes it more true.

A life in journalism can cure a person of false knowledge - because, if you choose to cover original sources, you can also uncover the origin of false knowledge - but that cure only works if people want it, and many people do not.

Now, Jane, get busy and write that book! You know the history, and I will help any way I can. And congrats to you and Gord on a very worthwhile project!

*Unnecessarily - but just for the record - let me clarify that government can and should protect children from unfit parents. But unfitness must be based on concrete evidence in the present, not on speculation about the supposed past or future of humanity. Government will always find itself fully occupied in the present and near future, and has - in my view - no brief for policy based on mere speculation.

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