…If we could listen in on the mind of the typical modern scientist, technocrat, or “thought leader” (whether geneticist, cyberneticist, or whatever else), in a moment of completely unguarded reflection, about the next steps humanity must take, what would we most likely hear? Here is the kind of voice, and the general themes, that come to mind:
“Look, we’re never going to get where we need to go if we don’t recognize the need to freely experiment–and that necessarily means on humans, and in large numbers.
“I know what you’re thinking. How crazy! How monstrous! What hubris! Another Mengele in the making! But I would ask you to consider: what really makes people react in this way to the idea of mass human experimentation? Why do they see only the bad, and never the potential? Don’t they know at all how much good has already come from such experimentation? Medicines, conveniences, foods, entertainments, defense systems, even forms of governance! But this they don’t see, as they take it for granted.
“Some might also bring up some sort of ‘metaphysical’ consideration, like the ‘inherent dignity of the person’, or the like. These too are misguided, a kind of category mistake. Such ideas are politically necessary; that doesn’t mean they actually exist. We’ve at long last managed to distance ourselves, I hope, from those metaphysical shibboleths that say ‘person’ is literally something more than a legalistic construct somewhat arbitrarily applied to certain bio-organic automata of the genus Homo. This uncoupling from literal metaphysics is really the singular liberation of modernity.
“So where does that liberation get us? To me it means we don’t have to tremble with fear when we change some base-pairs or add some new genes to a ‘person’, as if we’re somehow defacing this special masterpiece or calling down some wrath or reckoning. We’re not ‘abusing God’s creation’, say, because a) god is a myth in the first place, b) evolution shows that humanity, far from being a ‘creation’, is no more than an arbitrary and contingent snap-shot of random processes that are constantly ongoing, and c), most importantly, we’re not really abusing at all, but improving.
“We stand, in fact, on the threshold of a wondrous era when, for the first time, we can break free of evolution–when we ourselves can do what before was always fatuously attributed to some ‘god’ or other. We can be the creators, and we can be the creation. We can, for the first time, bring the spark of creation and meaning itself to this uncreated, pointless world. We can make ourselves in our own image.
“But none of it will happen if we are timid. It won’t happen if we continue, superstitiously, to stop short at certain magical ‘lines’ of conduct, as though these lines ever had an existence of their own beyond the force of nominal social convention and ignorance.
“You may say there will be side-effects or suffering if we go forward with human experiments. I reply, of course there will be some disappointments, some misfortunes. What would you expect? The whole point of experimentation is that most of the experiments yield some null result. But out of those null results, vital clues are gleaned.
“That is why I think we will mostly be able to get the experiments done voluntarily–that is, without resort to force. Helping reveal those clues in itself will offer our experimental subjects a greater sense of purpose and validation than most of them would have ever experienced in their whole lives. And after all, it’s not like we’d experiment mainly on the most essential or gifted parts of society, at least not until we are further along. We’d have a pretty hard time designing, carrying out and analyzing the results of the experiments without them!
“The experimentation, besides being voluntary, will of course have to be absolutely systematic. I think a natural way to do this would be to set up some kind of universalized yet fully accessioned and trackable system of genetic updates, like version-control–basically Github for the human genome. Similar things already exist, though not on this scale, and only for spontaneous, rather than directed variants. Then we could use routine genetic injections–say, as part of a soft-mandated vaccination regimen–to ‘push’ our updates to the experimental groups.
“So every part of the process would be voluntary, meticulously curated, and not least, deeply fulfilling for all involved. But besides all that, who can really doubt at this point that the side-effects and sufferings of doing nothing–of leaving humanity to fester in its current self-destructive, maladjusted, nay uncreated state, would be far worse than those of taking up the challenge of genetic stewardship and improvement?
“Here I in no way am intimating a return to eugenics, with its crude and inhumane methods of sterilization or sometimes deportation. Rather, we aim not to discard some, but to elevate all, through precise, targeted and ultimately liberating modification, with a grand objective of realizing unlimited self-creation for every member of humankind.
“This is a solemn charge, a vital next stage on the road. The hour grows long. It is more than a matter of Progress or Knowledge at this point. These now seem quaint, almost outdated in themselves. It is, rather, a matter of obeying the only God that matters: the god that we are meant to become. I have every confidence that in the years ahead, as we look upon what we have made, lo, we will see that it is good.”
The above is not a quotation, of course, but an impression, a thought-experiment, an attempt to live within the mind of someone I am not, and there to hear thoughts that normally would only be let free in very select company, or in disjointed pieces—a snippet here, a snippet there, like bread-crumbs. But if we grant that this impression is in fact even roughly representative of the zeitgeist in our “thinking classes”—as virtually all the philosophical motifs in the preceding are quite typical of the average scientist, or technocrat, or “thought-leader” of our day—then a much more haunting question arises.
That question is: what is to be done about such people? More specifically, we could ask: do they deserve to rule?—or for that matter: are they fit to be anywhere near positions of real power at all?
Peeling The Paradox 