Any coverage of the history of addiction, or anything in mental health, that doesn’t touch on the hubris of eugenics is failing to be honest about the ways scientific institutions can aggregate enough hubris to try and play God.
The degeneration theories put out by those like B.A. Morel functioned as a perverse parallel to the developments preceding Darwin’s natural selection and subsequent arguments about evolution. Defining degeneration as anything that deviates from a “natural” or “normal” state, advocates of the theory attempted to model degeneration as mental capacity that declines from parent to child until a generation is born sterile. Morel’s categories of degeneration included hysteria, moral insanity, imbeciles, and idiots. Psychiatrists found it a convenient way to both connect moral theories of illness to physiology and label any disease they couldn’t find the cause of as a quirk of an individual’s degeneration process. To put it crudely, “we don’t know what’s wrong so they were probably born to be sick and immoral.”
Predictably, a lot of dumb and horrible projects came out of this idea of degeneration. The Nazis used it as a basis for eugenics, fascist movements in Europe used it in arguments about immigration, and many scientists have attempted to predict criminality from facial features or skull shape. That last one is still something being explored by researchers and law enforcement institutions, with a notable recent controversy coming out of the AI community’s computer vision models. To this day, I argue that elite academic institutions suffer from a historical bias of preferring investigations into nature over nurture. It’s not exactly an attractive proposition to take credit away from yourself and towards factors outside of yourself.
It wasn’t just the fashion of the time to believe this either. Sigmund Freud rejected Morel’s work and degeneration theory.