Human improvement

Play Pink Misty for Me

January 19, 2010  6 comments

In Vanity Fair, the superb William Langewiesche ((Of whom I first became aware when I reviewed his American Ground.)) profiles a US Army sniper. About halfway through, as background, Langewiesche discusses the military’s response to claims that most frontline soldiers in the second world war did not fire their rifles:

[T]he Pentagon […] initiated a decades-long human-improvement campaign. By the Korean War, in the 1950s, surveys showed that fully half of the frontline riflemen who saw the enemy fired their weapons in response. In Vietnam, the number rose to 90 percent despite the unpopularity of the war and the low morale among troops.

It is a delightful invention of euphemistic bureaucratese, this human-improvement campaign — as though we must all agree that persuading humans to fire guns more often at other humans necessarily improves the first set of humans (if not the second, for obvious reasons).

Presumably, Langewiesche invented this phrase knowingly as a satirical nod to military unspeak. I initially assumed that it was real jargon, but the only other place google finds human-improvement campaign is in a random chat transcript. There are more results, however, for variants such as human-improvement processes (what “life coaches” will sell you), or human-improvement program (top: the “Church of Satan”!); as well as what Nature in 1910 called a “useful little book“, entitled Eugenics, the Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding.

What human improvements would you like to see, readers?