From the Archives: Creating Nature IV (Chapter 6 of The Future and Its Enemies)

Nature itself remains amoral and out of control, giving us only if-then statements, not telling us what to want or do. We cannot fob off our moral choices on nature.

This is the fourth and final excerpt from chapter 6 of The Future and Its Enemies (part I, part II, part III).

Much of the stasist opposition to biotechnology stems from the idea that such interventions in human biology are unnatural and hence immoral. As Kass told the Times: “Nobody wants to stand around and point a finger at this woman and say, You’re immoral.’ But generalize the practice and ask yourself, What does it really mean that we don’t accept the life cycle or the life course? That’s one of the big problems of the contemporary scene. You’ve got all kinds of people who make a living and support themselves but who psychologically are not grown up. We have a culture of functional immaturity.” Defying nature, in this assessment, is both immoral and immature. Virtue and wisdom lie in accepting what nature gives us—a life course of three score years and ten, a life pattern determined by evolution and luck, not by human action.

Kass’s reaction is what pediatrician and bioethicist Norman Fost has called the “I was like—whoa” argument, after an expression his teenage daughter frequently used to describe her shock and disgust with this or that friend’s actions. Kass’s disdain turns a subjective distaste for artifice into a philosophical principle, creating a high-brow version of McKibben’s declaration that the prospect of genetic engineering “sickens” him. Indeed, Kass makes a positive virtue of interpreting aesthetic reaction as moral principle, writing elsewhere that “in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.”

The real problem for Kass’s “natural science,” it seems, may be the unrevolutionary nature of biotechnology—our ability to integrate once-inconceivable new technologies into the mundane conventions of bourgeois existence. We don’t grab onto high-tech medicine because it’s new and different but because it offers to solve practical problems. As a result, we draw even the most extraordinary technologies into a broader cultural context that is far more resilient than reactionary wise men like to think. In a world where it’s no big deal to take hormone therapy, Viagra, or Prozac, to have a face lift, or to know a child’s sex before birth, a world in which even such radical interventions as sex-change operations and heart transplants have failed to turn society upside down, it is extremely difficult to argue that medical innovations are dangerous simply because they fool Mother Nature. It’s hard to maintain the “like—whoa” attitude for very long.

Kass’s repugnance argument also begs the question of what is central to our humanity. Why is it defined by a biological form or reproductive process, rather than the quest to learn and improve our condition? Many dynamist thinkers argue that, paradoxically, change and self-transformation are among the truest expressions of our enduring human nature.

“If human nature, on whatever basis, is seen as encompassing at least some forms of self-creation or self-transformation, then change is an aspect of a continuing (and unchanging?) capacity or predisposition for change,” writes Michael H. Shapiro, a legal scholar concerned with the philosophical implications of “performance enhancement” technologies. “Changing in some ways is thus remaining the same in another way: we continue the process of realizing one’s potential—and perhaps even raising it.” If, as Kass suggests, our wills are not autonomous of our bodies—as indeed they are not—the answer is not to subordinate the will to the body, the romantic choice. The answer is to allow mind and body to work together so that individuals can better accomplish their purposes.

There may, of course, be specific moral arguments against particular biotech interventions, especially genetic changes to shape the not-yet-born, because those actions could cause suffering to the people they affect. But such arguments would be based on our moral sympathy and respect for individual lives and on particular knowledge of the specific application, not on a general reverence for natural forms. By contrast, revering nature means sacrificing the purposes of individuals to preserve the world as given. It requires that we force people to live with biological conditions that trouble them, whether diseases such as cystic fibrosis or schizophrenia, disabilities such as myopia or crooked teeth, or simply less beauty, intelligence, happiness, or grace than could be achieved through artifice.

Turning nature into the source of morality has always been philosophically problematic. At its best, ethical naturalism provides useful heuristics based on highly stylized ideas of nature. By imagining individuals as possessing natural rights, for example, we curb the destructive impulse to intrude on their personal autonomy. Using a different model of nature, however, we could just as easily justify a contrary idea—the organic holism of the ethnic group or the dominance of the strong. Nature itself remains amoral and out of control, giving us only if-then statements, not telling us what to want or do. We cannot fob off our moral choices on nature. It offers not norms but only the “permissiveness” that Donald Worster scorns in the new ecology. And in our “biological century,” nature has become a dangerous place to look for moral standards.

We live, after all, in an era in which evolutionary psychology explains that sexual promiscuity and often-violent sexual jealousy are only natural for human males, an outcome of reproductive imperatives. Psychopharmacology demonstrates that changing brain chemistry can change personality. Traits ranging from happiness to violent tendencies to sexual orientation appear to be at least partially “hardwired,” the product of our natural physical makeup. These ideas have zoomed out of the labs, academic conferences, and psychiatrists’ offices to permeate popular culture. They are the stuff of best-selling books, newsweekly cover stories, and talk show discussions. They are inescapable.

There are several possible reactions to these biological insights into the physical origins of the self. One, suggested by the writer Tom Wolfe, is that

the notion of a self—a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior—a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds—this old-fashioned notion (what’s a bootstrap, for God’s sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away…. The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cypher into a giant among men … is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882.

The result, Wolfe fears, will be a “lurid carnival that… may make the phrase ‘the total eclipse of all values’ seem tame.” If we see ourselves as biological beings, whose nature arises from the interplay of purely physical forces, he predicts, all hell will break loose.

Clinging to ethical naturalism makes Wolfe’s scenario all the more likely. Establishing amoral nature as a moral exemplar leaves us with no way, short of divine revelation, to judge actions that have identifiable natural causes. Rather than teach us to live well in the world as it is, ethical naturalism can only imagine a different world and then tell us that this imagined nature dictates good behavior. That “noble lie” will not hold up for long, especially in a culture where every half-baked implication of every scientific discovery is instantly the subject of media chatter. No wonder Wolfe is scared.

Wolfe’s is a plausible scenario, but not a necessary one. Equally plausible is Shapiro’s suggestion that a greater understanding of our biological nature will simply give us more tools with which to shape our selves—more ways to “become more intelligent and lift [ourselves] to the very peaks of life,” more ways to transform ourselves from helpless cyphers into giants. Those techniques won’t necessarily make us more diligent, but they will certainly make us responsible for our fates.

If we understand biological nature as morally neutral, rather than a source of standards and justifications, there is no reason not to evaluate actions by their consequences rather than their causes. That a serial killer acted out of genetic and biochemical influences does not make his murders less terrible. That biology encourages a mother to protect her children does not make her nurturing less admirable. That the will summoned through some neurons can endure the pain or resist the anger signaled by others does not mean self-control is meaningless. David Hume was right: Reason has always been the slave of the passions. That makes the cultivation of life-enhancing moral sentiments, like the cultivation of better crops, both an exercise of artifice and an essential goal of civilization.

We have learned through sometimes bitter trial-and-error history that some behavior is compatible with human life, with peace and prosperity, and with increasing happiness and knowledge, and some is not. The source is less important than the result: We are well served to tolerate diverse personal goals, to respect the limits of centralized knowledge, to avoid hurting people who hurt no one themselves, and to respect the bonds of life not because natural forms tell us to do so but because we have learned through long and difficult cultural evolution that these rules will, more often than not, improve the human condition. The rules that permit dynamism and learning—that curb our instincts to distrust strangers, cling to the familiar, and impose our will on others—are among our most valuable of artifacts and, at the same time, the creators of new, evolving natural systems.

That our minds, our personalities, our selves are not separate from our bodies, that they are also natural systems, emerging from the complex interactions of their component physical parts, does not make them less precious or less important. It makes them all the more amazing. Nor does grounding our selves in physical substance make those selves less real—to the contrary. That understanding gives us greater opportunity to cultivate the selves we will become. To the traditional and enduring arts of “study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up,” we add the tools of genetics and biochemistry.

The only question, then, is whether we will make those tools the province of individual self-fashioning or technocratic tyranny. When stasists invoke Brave New World to assail biotechnology, they forget that its world, too, is a static model: a technocratic nightmare controlled by a central authority, a completely artificial world molded to a single vision. It is the central control, not the technology, that makes that world artificial.

Aldous Huxley’s imagined society in fact follows Pat Buchanan’s maxim, offered as an attack on cloning, that “mankind’s got to control science, not the other way around.” That society has taken up Rifkin’s challenge to conduct a “rich and robust conversation over the kind of future we’d like for ourselves” and then imposed that single vision.

Huxley’s dystopia has heeded the advice of our technocratic bioethicists and editorialists—of all the people who solemnly intone that “society” must adopt an official, uniform attitude toward each new biological technique, rather than allow decentralized, trial-and-error choice. These technocrats argue, as one columnist puts it, that “because of the emotional investment of family members, society’s dispassionate heads must set policy.” Following that pat prescription is the only way to get Brave New World. The novel’s horror comes less from the mere presence of exotic technologies than from the uniformity and complacency of life in its world. It is a technocratic dystopia that has banished dynamism and cancelled the infinite series.

Contrary to Buchanan’s personification of them, neither “mankind” nor “science” is a unitary actor. Both are complex, natural systems, composed of diverse individual human beings. Neither is under central control. The same is true of the “society” that Rifkin warns might “decid[e] that a certain skin color is a disorder.” In a dynamist society, there can be no such decision, because there is no single authority to make it.

Yet time and again, stasists warn against biological dynamism for the very reason that they assume someone will be in charge, enforcing a homogeneous model of humanity. Kass attacks in vitro fertilization and cloning on the grounds that “to lay one’s hands on human generation is to take a major step toward making man himself simply another one of the man-made things. … Thus, human nature becomes simply the last part of nature that is to succumb to the modern technological project, a project that has already turned all the rest of nature into raw material at human disposal, to be homogenized by our rationalized technique according to the artistic conventions of the day.” Kass’s fear of “rationalized” homogenizátion assumes a technocratic world.

How, Rifkin muses, “is it possible for people to be leery of trusting anyone with authority over genetic technology and at the same time be in favor of the development of the technology itself?” The answer is simple. People want genetic technology to develop because they expect to use it for themselves, to help themselves and their children, to work and to keep their own humanity. They see the new biological arts, like the rest of medical science, from the point of view of customers, not the perspective of rulers. In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own. The stasists who frighten us with visions of bioengineered conformity forget that art is a way not just of controlling nature but of expressing and recreating the self. Only rarely will that self-expression lead to dull uniformity.

Our very selves, then, are part of the garden, simultaneously artificial and natural, within our control and beyond it. We need choose neither destruction nor quarantine: Nature and artifice are not antitheses but complements. “The wilderness is not just something you look at; it’s something you are part of. You live inside a body made of wilderness material. I think that the intimacy of this arrangement is the origin of beauty. The wilderness is beautiful because you are part of it,” writes architect Paul Shepheard. “Cultivation—the work of humans—has a different sort of beauty. There is nothing else under the sun than what there has always been. Cultivation is the human reordering of the material of the wilderness. If it is successful, the beauty of it lies in the warmth of your empathy for another human’s effort.”

To reorder the material of the wilderness is the work of humans. But it is also our play, an activity pursued for its own sake. Through it, we not only create and explore nature but enjoy it. The sources of dynamism—of creativity and cultivation—lie not just in discipline but in delight.

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