From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Aug 25 2002 - 20:36:17 MDT
I'm in the process of reviewing Dr Stock's book myself, so was gruesomely
entertained by this ill thought-out review of 'Redesigning Humans': Taking
Charge of Our Own Heredity:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/books/review/25MARANTO.html?todaysheadlines
Consider the end:
==========
The lesson he takes from history is that eugenics itself wasn't
wrongheaded, just the nationalistic, totalitarian applications of it.
''Given Hitler's appalling foray into racial purification,'' he writes,
''European sensitivities are understandable, but they miss the bigger
picture.''
For Stock, this bigger picture is clear. The future is a time in which
individuals will be able to go into a clinic and, through a simple
procedure, obtain embryos fitted with chromosomal modules that will slow
aging, eliminate disease and enhance personality, temperament, intellect
and beauty. It's a pleasant enough fantasy. But even if evolution could be
steered in a positive direction, why presume that humans have the wisdom to
do so? ''Redesigning Humans'' is an act of both boosterism and
reductionism. It admits but then ignores the enormous complexity of
biological systems; it places biology firmly above social, ecological and
economic considerations; and it reduces concepts like success in life to
the purely physical, as if health and longevity were the only issues that
mattered. Isn't it pretty to think so?
Gina Maranto is the author of ''Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed
Better Human Beings.''
=====================
Maranto starts, inevitably, with the Hitler card. She might as well stop
there; that does the job. If Hitler ate toast for breakfast, it's obviously
an obscene and wicked thing to do.
But she goes on anyway. And here is her `argument': we must be very worried
by the `biomedical tinkerings' scientists get up to, because the results
are a `fantasy'.
Say what?
Yes, Stock's predictions of extended longevity, etc, are `a pleasant enough
fantasy'.
Why, then, should we be concerned about them? What's the point of wondering
if we `have the wisdom to do' something that she's already dismissed as a
`fantasy'? And could such mere biological tinkerings have any ill effects
anyway, on her account--except to waste research money, and disappoint
parents gulled by simplistic nonsense?
Apparently not, since it is allegedly a failing on Stock's part (although I
must say this goes against my own incomplete reading of his book) that he
wrongly supposes `concepts like success in life [reduce] to the purely
physical, as if health and longevity were the only issues that mattered.'
But suppose he *did* foolishly believe that; then, as Maranto notes, it
would just be `pretty to think so' (or perhaps pretty stupid to think so).
One doesn't find the NYT review pages running scornfully alarmist notices
of books promoting the Flat Earth, the benefits of eating coal, the
imminent arrival of the Greys to take over human politics, or any number of
other `pretty fantasies'. That's because even though some people might
deludedly adhere to such notions, their real-world impact will be negligible.
What surely is really exercising Maranto is her unadmitted dread that
Stock's `fantasies' *will* come about. But of course if they do, it will
become obvious (as it is already to anyone who thinks seriously about the
matter for a few minutes) that success in life is *not* `purely physical'
in any brainlessly reductive sense, that health and longevity are *not* the
only issues that matter. Of course Dr Stock does not think they
are--although, yes, these are important *preconditions* to an optimal and
satisfying life, and we deserve to see them improved.
As Stock notes near the outset, what alarms people like Leon Kass isn't the
fear `that this technology will fail, but that it will succeed, and succeed
gloriously'.
What intellectuals do need to consider seriously, especially on such a
gung-ho list as this, is whether the consequences of such `glorious'
success might after all prove to be distinctly *inglorious*, but that's not
a possibility Maranto even begins to confront.
Damien Broderick
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