1998-01-19
You may have heard that a Richard Seed, a scientist in Chicago, has announced that he is going to proceed with human cloning experiments, in spite of President Clinton’s request for a voluntary ban on such experiments for five years. Then it was announced that two labs, one in the U.S. and one in Bath, England, have succeeded in cloning headless mice and tadpoles.
Charles Krauthammer, in Time Magazine, reacts with horror. Please, oh please don’t create headless humans. He feels it should be a capital crime. "Cloning is the technology of narcissism".
Well, I didn’t know narcissism was a crime. But I do know we don’t have room in all the prisons in the world for the guilty. And I know that Krauthammer is a raving hypocrite. We have spent 200 years building the culture of narcissism and Time Magazine has been it’s biggest cheerleader. Suddenly Frankenstein gets up and walks, and Time goes "eek". Where was Time Magazine’s righteous indignation when we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
There is one major problem with stopping scientific experiments on human clones. We don’t have the intellectual, moral, or cultural framework left to support the idea. Our boldest thinkers have killed God, the thoughtless middle class has locked him into a charming little box in a tiny little corner of Sunday, and most of our religious "leaders" are too busy building crystal cathedrals and erecting statues of themselves to do anything more than rant about high school sex education and pornography on the Internet. And now science has gone pornographic and nobody is ready to grapple with the complex scientific and moral issues that arise from it.
The problem is that the idea of free enterprise, or allowing the "market" to determine the success, failure, or acceptability of different technological inventions or ideas, has come to dominate not only our society’s economics and corporate management and even government, but our culture as well. And the fundamental philosophical belief that makes free enterprise possible is individualism. If you ask yourself, who should have ultimate authority to determine whether or not you can buy something, read a book, listen to music, watch a video, or wear your seatbelt—the answer is always "me". We don’t want the government, the church, the union, or the corporation to have that authority. We want it all for ourselves. And if we want to make brain-less clones to provide us with an unlimited future supply of transplantable organs, who has the right to stop us?
Let’s say the government does pass a law—as seems likely—banning the creation of human clones. First of all, some big corporation (or maybe a bold, little corporation) is going to go ahead and do it anyway and then challenge the law in court. Try to imagine the Supreme Court’s ruling on the issue. What are the grounds they will give for supporting the law? As long as the clones don’t have a brain, they won’t be human, because our courts and legislatures have steadily shrunk the definition of "human" in order to accommodate all the other scientific developments of this century, including artificial respirators that can keep brain-dead humans "alive" indefinitely, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and, of course, abortion. Would you want to argue that cloning violates some universal concept of human dignity? The courts have ruled over and over again that such concepts are religious in nature and thus discriminatory.
Even if the Supreme Court in the U.S. supported the law, scientists would simply move off-shore to some obliging little island nation and proceed with impunity. Does anyone doubt that there’s money to be made in this business, regardless of any national laws?
So there will be no law. We will clone humans because we can clone humans. We have a new Pandora’s box before us and we will open it because we have already opened every other Pandora’s box and nobody knows any more how to even conceive of an idea of a rationale for keeping it closed.
What are we going to do with all these new powers? We’re going to live longer. We’re going to automate everything. We’re going to have all the information in the world at our finger-tips. We’re going to become more and more self-sufficient and self-contained. We’re going to be completely selective about what we do, who we see, what we know about, where we go, what we believe. Can government survive these developments? Can the church? Can the family? In Sweden, already, almost half the population lives alone. In the future, all of us may have two, three, or four different families in our lifetimes, and then, for the last decades of our lives, we will live alone, because the ultimate convenience is to be completely self-sufficient.
No civilization in history has been faced with so many issues that confront the question of what being human really means. The Middle Ages believed that man was a worm riding on the waves of a colossal tempest, whose only dignity was the possibility of redemption by an all-powerful god. The Renaissance gave man faith in himself, as "the measure of all things". The late 19th Century gave rise to a prevailing belief in human progress—both moral and material. The sinking of the Titanic was a little blip on the radar screen of the horizon of human potential; the two World Wars—including the holocaust and Hiroshima—were major blips. But we continued our race to the future. To the average citizen, the 1949 World’s fair, with its displays on the wonders of technology, had more impact than the ruminations of Jean-Paul Sartre on absurdity. Now, with the collapse of communism and world peace, for the first time, within our grasp, we seem to stand on the brink of unimaginable wealth and progress. The computer and the Internet have become the poster boys of this brave new world, and DNA manipulation may be the crown jewel. But all of these developments have created a profound spiritual unease.
What if we are soon able to live to 100? 120? 150? Can a marriage last 100 years? I don’t think so. Think about it: our notions of fidelity and commitment were forged in an era in which the average life-span was less than 40 years. People married young, so the average marriage lasted about 25 years. Is the rise in the divorce rate merely a reflection of the fact that people can live together for only so long? The Bible is emphatic about divorce—it is wrong. But life expectancy in 30 A.D. was even shorter than it was in the 19th century, and the status of women was equal to livestock. Can such an imperative survive today’s social climate?
And what will we think about as we replace our burned out organs and continue to grow older? Will we grow wise and begin to understand that there are moral satisfactions that can’t be bought or manufactured? Or will we grow foolish and increasingly desperate, and resort to drugs and cosmetic surgeries and ever greater obscenities in order to recapture the shallow illusions about the satisfactions of youth and vigor and sexual appeal?
© Copyright 1998 Bill Van Dyk