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by
John J. Reilly



February 3, 2002
======================= Scary Babies

There was a picture of one of these on the cover of The Weekly Standard of February 4, 2002. As you might expect, the theme of the issue was biotechnology and its implications for the suddenly problematical human condition. The prospect of reproductive human cloning is only the beginning of evils, it would seem. I have some scattered observations about the two pieces in the issue on the subject.

"Kass Warfare," by Andrew Ferguson, was about the first public session of the President's Council on Bioethics, which is headed by the bioethicist Leon Kass. The rest of the council consists of jurists, philosophers and a gaggle of scientists. The session stared with a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1846 short story, "The Birthmark." That's the one about the scientist who tries to cure his otherwise perfect wife's single tiny blemish and kills her in the process.

The liberal-arts types on the council reached for an interpretation of this story as an allegory of the principle that the attempt to perfect humanity destroys humanity. The math-science geeks were offended by the fact that Hawthorne plainly did not know what scientists did or why they did it. Actually, the best interpretation of the story may be rather technical. Writing in the heyday of New England Transcendentalism, Hawthorne may have simply been trying to illustrate the Kantian notion that absolutes are noumenal rather than phenomenal. That is, we never experience perfection or any pure condition. Such ideals should guide our actions, but we will never see them realized.

The article emphasized the insufficiency of the Yuck Factor, meaning the visceral reaction that people usually have to ideas like cloning when they are first proposed. The Yuck Factor is not a historical constant, Ferguson notes. The laws against miscegenation were backed largely by an inarticulate distaste for the idea of congress between the races. The laws disappeared when the distaste did. The Council on Bioethics is supposed to map out principled arguments about what we should and should not do that will stand scrutiny even when emotions change.

I would add that biotechnology often brings something else into play, what might be called the Pet Shop Factor. This refers to the Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese goes to a pet shop to buy a fish, but finds that the shop has only dogs. The shop owner offers to turn a puppy into a fish by vivisection. Cleese agrees, but only on condition that he can watch. It is possible to be greedy of wonders. Quite aside from whether it is a good idea to tinker with fundamental human biology, there is still the raw curiosity about whether it is really possible.

I am not altogether convinced that the Yuck Factor is completely malleable. People still find abortion viscerally repugnant, for instance, whatever they think of it ideologically. On the other hand, I must admit that the Yuck Factor does not work for me in the way it apparently does for most commentators on bioethics. For many people, maybe most people, the use of tissue from embryonic clones as transplant material is quite unproblematical. For me, therapeutic cloning smacks of cannibalism. On the other hand, I am not terribly disturbed by the idea of reproductive cloning. This is not to say that I think it's a good idea. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, some things people should do without expert assistance, even if they do them badly. Reproduction surely falls into that class of things. The objections to cloning are the same as those against all in vitro reproduction. These things are mistakes, but understandable mistakes.

Reproductive cloning, even if it were legal, would not be systemically interesting. Few people would have themselves cloned. I suspect there would be rather more interest in cloning other people, such as famous athletes or geniuses. In any case, the practice would be the kind of thing that appealed to folk with more money than sense. The real problem might be that anyone foolish enough to do such a thing might not be psychologically competent to raise the resulting children.

Other sorts of biotechnology really could change some fundamentals, however. The separation of reproduction from human pregnancy would do that. Artificial wombs, or the use of animal wombs, could abolish motherhood. (There are feminists who have argued for just that, in the mistaken belief that it would raise the status of women.) Immortality, not an altogether implausible prospect these days, would be as great a change. Readers may acquaint themselves with other prospective enhancements and diminutions by following the popular-science press.

This is the sort of question considered in The Weekly Standard's title essay, "Does Human Nature Have a Future?" The author, Peter Augustine Lawler, there suggests that Bobos (David Brooks's "bourgeois bohemians") may be an eschatological people. Given the technological option, he argues, the Bobos would be more than willing to step out of human history into a new state of being, one without birth or death or love. Even today they are prepared to trade free will for successful psychopharmacology, provided it does not make them fat.

While many of these points are well taken, I would not be too quick to identify human nature, which should be preserved, with human history so far. 1 John 2 tells us that what we will be has not yet been made known. For instance, the human condition until very recently meant that some children in almost every family would die before reaching adulthood. The decline in the death rate among the young changed many implicit assumptions about the value of human life, all for the better. Culture in general, and science in particular, helps us approach the human condition.

There is a phenomenon in evolutionary history called "pre-adaptation." An organism can appear in one environment and not do particularly well, but then become spectacularly successful in another context. This is exactly what happened to humanity. We make passable scavengers and pack-hunters, which is what the human race was for most of its existence. Then, in a few isolated pockets, we invented civilization, and took to it like fish to water. It is not too much to say that human nature was always destined for artificial environments, however long it took for the environments to arise.

I suggest that a similar argument might allay some plausible fears about post-humanity. For instance, there is a good argument for the augmentation of longevity to a span more compatible with human dignity. Every individual should live long enough to become an institution. I think it is certainly true that heredity could be modified to eliminate what are obviously diseases. The awe and fear that DNA occasions is a case of misplaced concreteness. It is not true that all the information needed to create an organism is encrypted in its DNA. The information in the nucleus is merely a factor in heredity; the famous genetic code simply assembles long proteins, which then twist and interact in a way that may be intractably obscure. I fully agree that human life has an essence, but DNA isn't it.

Back in the 1960s, someone asked Martin Heidegger what the greatest danger to the human race was. "Cybernetics," he replied. He was right. I worry much more about artificial intelligence.

Beggar , n. One who has relied on the assistance of his friends.

Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary

End


Copyright © 2002 by John J. Reilly


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