Crítica da razão eugênica: a educação para a consciência racial em Renato Kehl, Salvador de Toledo Piza Júnior e Octavio Domingues

Abstract

Defined by the English polymath Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) as the science of racial improvement, eugenics became popular among the Brazilian intellectual elite in the context of the First Republic. In the 1920s and 1930s, the “moderate” interpretations that conceived eugenics as synonymous with hygiene and sanitation were contested by the most radical wing of this movement, which envisioned the racial improvement of the population by combating the “degenerative threats” represented by blacks, mestizos, disabled and poor workers. Edited in Rio de Janeiro by the physician and pharmacist Renato Ferraz Kehl (1889-1974), the Boletim de Eugenia (1929-1933) became the largest journal specialized in the science of racial improvement in Brazil. In 1932 and 1933, its direction was taken over by professors from the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ) Salvador de Toledo Piza Júnior (1898-1988) and Octavio Domingues (1897-1972). Transforming a propaganda newspaper into a scientific magazine, the two renowned geneticists from Piracicaba scientifically supported eugenics based on Mendelian genetics, guaranteeing the continuity of the popularization project started by Kehl. Starting from this historical context, with theoretical-methodological support in documentary and bibliographical research, we analyze the education for the eugenic conscience or racial conscience exposed in the articles, correspondences, lectures, and books published by the three Boletim de Eugenia's directors. We explain the epistemological foundations of lato sensu education envisaged by these intellectuals, contrasting them with the theoretical-critical diagnosis of the crisis of reason elaborated by Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). We found that the Horkheimerian argument that denounced the enlightened roots of eugenics remains fundamental to the understanding of what we call eugenic reason, that is, the instrumental and mythologized reason that enabled the dissemination of eugenics as a socially accepted science. We verified that the objectification and manipulation of sex by the instrumental reason, according to which marriage and sexual relations should be submitted to the laws determined by the enlightened intellectuality, constituted the core of the education for the eugenic conscience developed in the Boletim de Eugenia and, specifically, in the campaign undertaken by Kehl, Piza Júnior and Domingues. We demonstrate that the annulment of the subject from the reduction of the human being to his biological nature and the discourse of technical impartiality, by-products of the totalitarian face of the Enlightenment, founded the epistemological bases of the lato sensu education outlined by Galton and assimilated in a particular way by the three Boletim de Eugenia's directors. Finally, we question reductionist interpretations of the subject, such as the idea of eugenics as synonymous with conservatism, as a pseudoscience, as an irrationality dissociated from scientific progress, or as a surpassed past. We conclude with the proposition of the theoretical-critical model of eugenic reason for understanding the epistemological foundations of this science, according to which eugenics does not comprise a kind of return to barbarism, but precisely the triumph of enlightened progress.