This sorta' thing is right up your alley:
MONDAY, APRIL 28, 2003
EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
Brave New Science
The "pursuit of happiness" still ranks higher than the "defense of dignity"
By THOMAS G. DONLAN
AT THE END OF THE TEMPEST, Miranda is just beginning to emerge from nearly solitary life on an island inhabited only by her father and their servants, the monster Caliban and the sprite Ariel. She comes upon a group of men. Though castaways, they are dressed richly in the style of the court of Milan. She exclaims enthusiastically: "O brave new world, that has such people in it!" But Shakespeare wove The Tempest so that the audience knows that the richly dressed and attractive men are actually the villains who deposed her father and set the two adrift in a dinghy to die.
The frightful irony of her enthusiasm resonates for us as it did for Aldous Huxley, whose 1932 novel Brave New World offers a vision of peaceful, happy people, uniformly well-fed and well-clothed and well-entertained, divided by intelligence and function into only five social groups. They need not fear war or any human conflict because it has been bred out of them. And they are genetically engineered: born in bottles and raised in crèches, they live in drug-enhanced collective passivity.
In 1932, Stalin was already hard at work on his vision of a brave new world. Hitler had the same idea, although his reich was much shorter-lived. Mao Zedong came after them and some of his protégés are still with us. Huxley is still required reading for us, who like Miranda, need something to counter-balance our enthusiastic thoughts of political self-perfection.
The scientific trappings of Brave New World, which are more realistic than Prospero's magic in The Tempest, are mistaken today for Huxley's primary concern and caution.
Fifty years ago this month, James Watson and Francis Crick successfully modelled the structure of DNA. Fearful people started quoting from Brave New World. Twenty-five years ago, the first child was born who had been conceived in a petri dish and implanted in her mother's womb as an embryo. Fearful people brought their well-worn copies of Brave New World down from the shelf again. Francis Collins started the Human Genome Project 13 years ago, and last week the work was declared complete -- all to a chorus of dramatic readings from Brave New World.
One such reader is Leon Kass, the chairman of President Bush's commission on bioethics. His most recent book on the subject recalls Brave New World in an attempt to argue for a cautious approach to scientific progress in genetics and biological engineering.
It is a remarkably thoughtful, erudite and practical discussion, even though the name of the book provides a temptation to reject it out of hand. Kass titles it Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity. He replaces "the pursuit of happiness," which Thomas Jefferson and those who signed the Declaration of Independence agreed was one of the inalienable rights of individuals, with a term that he makes into a power of government over individual people.
The dignity that the state must defend, he says, is the dignity of human existence, which he defines with help from philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant. It flows from noble human attributes such as thought, the moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty, or at least from the human potential to have such attributes. It is not the dignity meant in the phrase "death with dignity," a euphemism for assisted suicide and euthanasia, from which Kass recoils.
His concept of human dignity extends to the dignity of creating new human beings. For him, only the good old-fashioned family way respects human dignity. He reluctantly accepts in-vitro fertilization and implant of embryos for procreation; he crusades against the possibility of cloning for human procreation; he is deeply suspicious of cloning embryos for medical treatment or medical research.
Kass says the government must ban cloning and some genetic research to defend human dignity. In this area, he says, the pursuit of happiness is too likely to lead us to Huxley's brave new world.
People on any side of this argument ought to read the book; some readers may even find that Kass is more effective at fairly presenting his opponents' case than at explaining his own reasoning.
Kass seems to be relying on the "yuck factor," the personal gag reflex that we all use to decide what lies outside our personal boundaries of propriety. Trouble arises, however, when we force our repugnance on everyone else.
We want what medical science is offering -- a better life and a longer life. For many people, cloning will turn out to be no more repugnant than allowing surgeons to train on cadavers. The task must not be to ban research or procedures, but to permit them in the widest possible variety, so that we do not arrive at the brave new world in which we are all alike.
The science in Brave New World is not the subject, it is the metaphor that presents the political subject: Subsuming the individual to utopian goals is within our power, but we should abjure it. The danger in Brave New World is not that we might individually use science to improve ourselves one at a time and each in his own way, but that we might use science and government to improve everyone in the same way.
Kass may be right to say that the future of mankind is at stake, but his effort to stop scientific progress on cloning is as misplaced as it is probably futile. It should lead us to ask why the government should have a commission on bioethics at all. This only became the government's business because it is the principal funder of scientific research. If we want to avoid Huxley's vision, we may have to remove government from this domineering role. |
