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August 13, 2007
Betsi Beem reviews Sheila Jasanoff Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and The United States. There is no doubt that recent major breakthroughs in biotechnology have made a huge contribution to human life. So we have the notion of biotechnology as a way of "improving" us or our children goes right to the heart of the idea of altering human nature.
In today’s moral debate over biotechnology the optimists are led by libertarians like Lee Silver, Gregory Stock, and Ronald Bailey. The Huxleyan pessimists are led by neoconservatives like Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, and William Kristol, and by environmentalists like Bill McKibben and Jeremy Rifkin. Both sides make the exaggerated claim that biotechnology is heading us towards the abolition of human nature.
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Then again you have gung-ho utopianists like George Gilder (a social Darwinist of an extreme kind in my opinion) who ironically is associated with the Christian based Discovery Institute with which Kristol et al are essentially fellow travelers.
And of course McKibben and Rifkin have nothing in common with Kristol too. Kristol is not a "conservative" he is a Barbarian with a capital B---just like Gilder.
As are so called "libertarians"---eternal adolescents strutting their stuff---totally fearful of being "controlled" by any outside influence. Never mind that we are all more or less totally controlled by the prevailing cultural script in which we have grown up in in. It is literally sculpted into our flesh. They are all devotees of Ayn Rand's "god" of the machine.
One dimensional hard edged "man"---more like robotic androids actually.