Enjoy Your Biotech Ceasefire
Enjoy Your Biotech Ceasefire
Be scared of politics.
There is an artificial ceasefire in the biotech wars. The political stakes are the highest they’ve ever been, according to both parties. Flight 93 logic rules both parties. There’s no time for factional squabbles about biotech and the nature of man.
Even abortion and IVF have been brushed aside by Trump to increase his favorables. It’s in part worked – the most recent high-quality poll found “47 percent of likely voters viewed Ms. Harris as too liberal, compared with 32 percent who saw Mr. Trump as too conservative”.
This peaceful bubble is temporary. I cannot emphasize this enough to my many technologists readers, some of whom are in biotech. Ari Schulman raises this question in the New York Times:
Classical-liberal critics of assisted reproductive technology, among whom I count myself, argue that it can unethically turn the arrival of a child, which should be considered a gift, into a project. We undertake projects to realize our own ambitions. We exert control, select useful material to meet desired outcomes and throw out waste.
The irony of the science fiction story “Gattaca” is that the most oppressed character was not the one at a biological disadvantage but the one whose parents’ designs for him were forever written into his biology. His life was not fully his own.
This is a historically powerful instinct not to be underestimated. However, it’s strange to claim this idea from the mantle of classical liberalism. Secular Classical liberalism says nothing about whether the combination of genes every “natural-born” human has, driven by evolution and the mate choices of their ancestors, are any less contraining than selected or modified genes.
Even more surprisingly, “God” and “Christ” do not appear at all in this editorial. It is the New York Times after all, but it’s clear that pro-life groups and others who defend the sanctity of unmodified birth are deeply motivated by faith. It also provides a grounding for the idea that modified genes are less free than unmodified ones. There is a contrast between a God-given natural order and one designated by man. There is no such contrast between an order simply parametized from evolution and one reparametierized by secular technology.
Ultimately, this is a fight between reason and revelation. Whether the revelation of Jesus Christ or of something more pagan, the sacredness of the existing order comes from a divine endowment. For the secular man, this sounds circular. Sacredness comes from divinity comes from sacredness? But the reality is that sacredness is first and foremost a transformational experience, emotional or spiritual, and both justifications of sacredness and divinity follow.
Underestimate revelation at your peril.
IVF is booming. 2.5% of births are IVF, growing fast. The technology still has a lot of room to improve, it will get cheaper and more effective. And it's just incredibly, incredibly popular among people who use it successfully. This technology literally gave you life.
Whereas the people who oppose IVF are almost all, it's some distant and theoretical thing to them. Some abstract principle.
I think this whole IVF debate is more like, a brief backlash to something new, the sort of backlash when something is becoming popular and people just start paying attention. Its fundamentals are very strong, politicians who align anti IVF are going to get burned.
I'd recommend a distinct term to distinguish between the normal meaning of 'revelation' in the religious context from the nature of the arbitrary (and evolving) value system underpinning progressive secular ideology.
In the religious context, the situation of revealed value hierarchy is explicit, acknowledged, and implicitly adopting the philosophical principle of meta-ethical moral nihilism that, absent the revelation, there would be no objective basis to claim greater validity or legitimacy for one set of values over any other. And this philosophical position is robust and irrefutable, see, e.g. Leff's "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law". All attempts at using natural revelation or utilitarianism or whatever else lead to dead ends, as their own internal logic dictates that they must.
Progressives on the other hand have a religious-like system of values, but explicitly deny that this system is supported by a basis in supernatural revelation, and claim further that it needs no such basis, and that by implication they have their own version of "natural law" where their set of values is effectively the subject of a real Science of ethics - objectively true with its basis in the nature of reality and whatever is not infinitely plastic and maleable about humanity - and furthermore in a way that is discoverable and inferable by means of observation, reason, and insight.
Can one properly call a value system revelatory when adherents - even erroneously - explicitly reject that it is revelatory and consider all revelatory value systems to be illegitimate? Maybe at least put a "crypto" prefix or append some other distinguishing modifier.