A Reasonable Light

Lyrics

It starts in the quiet stacks, between Husbandry and Human Stock.
The paper smells of paste and certainty.
A family tree, not of kings, but of fitness.
The lines are so clean on the page.

We were men of reason. We had laboratories.
We had tweed jackets and grants from foundations.
At Harvard, at Yale, we passed the chalk along the slate.
We drew the lines of inheritance, of what was strong and what was late.
It wasn't malice. It was a kind of hope.
A way to drain the swamp of misery, to give the future scope.
We called it progress. We called it civic grace.
To build a better nation, to elevate the race.

And we charted the bloodline's steady flow.
With a brass punch on a card, we decided who could grow.
It was science, a diagram of light,
Shining on the fit, and erasing the blight.
It was clear and simple, a statistical art.
Just a matter of mending the nation's heart.

Our fieldworkers went out in sensible shoes.
They carried clipboards and collected family news.
Feeble-minded. Shiftless. Prone to wander and to drink.
A hole punched in a pedigree, quicker than you'd think.
The state houses listened. The courts agreed.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough, they decreed.
We published the papers. We won the awards.
We were shaping the future with calipers and words.

And we charted the bloodline's steady flow.
With a brass punch on a card, we decided who could grow.
It was science, a diagram of light,
Shining on the fit, and erasing the blight.
It was clear and simple, a statistical art.
Just a matter of mending the nation's heart.

Then came the newsreel smoke from across the sea in 1945.
The pictures of the camps, the ovens, the barely-alive.
And our clean diagrams, our charts pinned to the wall,
Suddenly looked like something else. We heard a different call.
The same logic, just followed to the end of the line.
The same tidy science, but without a soul or spine.

And a quiet memo circulates.
The quiet hand begins to redact the grants and the dates.
Take Galton off the syllabus. File Davenport away.
Best not to mention what we taught here yesterday.
It wasn't a sudden virtue. It was just a deep, cold shame.
At seeing our own reflection in that consuming flame.
And I know, I know I would have believed.
I would have held the chalk, and been fatally deceived.