True Enough
SMITH, WESLEY J.
True Enough Bill McKihhen's useful assault on the unfettered biogenetic project By WESLEY J. SMITH People aren't smart enough, strong enough, pretty enough, healthy enough, talented enough, or...
...That seems to be the vague despair that drives the partisans of an unfettered biotech revolution, ideologues who countenance no limits in their near obsessive quest for human biological perfection...
...McKibben also risks alienating potential allies with his condescension toward religion...
...These emerging technologies are so elemental and powerful that, unfettered, they are more likely to lead to "species suicide" than salvation...
...Worse, the assemblers upon which futurists put so much hope to end human want might learn to replicate themselves and go completely out of control...
...Maybe...
...In answer, McKibben's defense of humanity reads a little like Stuart Smalley feel-goodism: We are good enough, smart enough, and, doggone it, the planet likes us...
...But Bill McKibben has spotted it clearly, this inchoate and incoherent existential dread that really does—like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel— resent, in equal measure, life and the death that will take it away...
...Just as God did, only this time without His mistakes...
...He thus reinforces the small cadre of progressive techno-skeptics—people like Jeremy Rifkin, author of Biotech Century, Stuart Newman of the Council for Responsible Genetics, and Rich Hayes of the Center for Genetics and Society...
...Nanotechnology, in which machines are literally the size of a few molecules, presents obvious potential benefits...
...Just as today's top-of-the line computer is quickly outdated, the enhanced baby would, within the few short years it would take to grow into childhood, become genetically inferior to the later-born genetically enhanced...
...This is folly, McKibben warns...
...McKibben may be alarmist when he writes that by the end of the century the distinction between humans and computers could cease to exist...
...And we should defend humanity from the nihilism of the misanthropes...
...McKibben begins Enough by describing the threats posed to the human future with cloning and genetic engineering, noting that genetic engineers intend to do to human babies what we have already done to salmon and wheat, pine trees and tomatoes...
...And if that were not enough, the information that could be gleaned from such research would be quickly used in precisely the ways that McKibben is against...
...in the achievements of [their] dishwashing detergent...
...We should say: Enough...
...McKibben is not the first to wrestle with these crucial matters, and he won't be the last...
...Unfortunately, to accomplish this important task, McKib-ben's resources seem limited...
...But therapeutic cloning is a posthu-man biotechnology that authorizes the manufacture of human life for the purpose of treating it as a mere thing to be harvested and destroyed...
...Futurists even foresee an end to work as agriculture and industry are replaced by billions of "nanotech assemblers" engineered to work busily rearranging carbon molecules to make any food or product their owners would want...
...In a sense, our children would never grow up and become independent beings...
...Yet he then goes on to accept therapeutic cloning in the name of finding new medical cures...
...From what he writes in Enough, I would guess that McKibben does not believe sufficiently in the intrinsic value of human life to make a robust case...
...Indeed, only a full-throated and unapologetic affirmation of the intrinsic value of human life will be able to counter the misanthropy that McKib-ben correctly sees as the driving force behind the posthuman agendas...
...But surely it would be folly to build computers so awesome that "a penny's worth of computing Only affirmation of the intrinsic value of life will counter the misanthropy McKibben correctly sees behind the posthuman agenda...
...We should never forget the lesson in needed humility taught by the unsinkable Titanic...
...Indeed, I have heard and read many of the same secular arguments McKibben makes presented just as eloquently and powerfully by explicitly religious techno-skeptics...
...It is not Luddite to worry, as McKib-ben does, about the "unlimited development of knowledge...
...to delete, modify, or add genes . . . so that the resulting person will produce proteins that make them taller and more muscular, or smarter and less aggressive, maybe handsome and possibly straight, perhaps sweet...
...Today, children urged to pursue unliked activities based on parental desire can eventually quit and find their own way...
...We should accept natural limitations...
...Why should the reader of Enough agree to reject the posthuman endeavors of tomorrow, when the author won't reject those being attempted today...
...Noting that researchers recently manufactured an infectious poliovirus from diagrams contained in a book, McKibben warns that nano-sized fabricated diseases could spread havoc...
...Worse yet, our miserable lives are over far too soon...
...And that presents a serious problem for his defense of humanity...
...This would result in built-in human obsolescence...
...These concerns do not unduly limit the book's importance or profundity...
...He insists, for instance, that any potential scientific advance that could have the power to make us "posthuman" should be "presumed dangerous until proven otherwise...
...Even happy...
...But the game of parental genetic-one-upmanship is certain disaster...
...He is the author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America and of the forthcoming updated edition of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder...
...True Enough Bill McKihhen's useful assault on the unfettered biogenetic project By WESLEY J. SMITH People aren't smart enough, strong enough, pretty enough, healthy enough, talented enough, or agile enough the way we are...
...Not only that, but our children would, in essence, become our slaves...
...Some might call this "playing God," but for the many transhumanists that deny that God exists it is simply a matter of "seizing control of human evolution...
...Enough is an important book and needs to be read by everyone with an interest in keeping the human future human...
...That is to make them better in some way...
...McKibben also isn't necessarily willing to follow his own proposed remedy of self restraint...
...Bill McKibben has done a top-notch job of researching and writing about one of the most important topics of the current age...
...But this is merely to surrender to unfair stereotypes...
...There are foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences to any human endeavor...
...Rather than increasing a child's chances to excel in life, the result of a genetics arms race would actually be to set up future failure as older models find it increasingly difficult to compete against the continual flow of new and improved humans continually entering the competitive marketplaces of school, college, career, athletics, and the arts...
...Religious arguments, he warns, "scare the majority of Americans who, for instance, support a woman's right to abortion...
...But, how would children rebel against their gene enhancements that would inexorably push them with the power of sheer biology in parentally predetermined directions...
...Moreover, McKibben's relative youth and his unabashed radical envi-ronmentalism (in addition to this book, he is the author of The End of Nature and a vocal proponent of "simple living") could positively influence the sort of people who might not otherwise be reachable in the ongoing debate over the proper limits to place on scientific research and technological knowledge...
...But what makes Enough so helpful is that he analyzes the challenges and posits solutions to them from the far political left...
...Such arguments offend because "it is too easy to imagine such talk is the chatter of people who don't want evolution taught in the schools...
...Tomorrow's impressive twenty-point IQ enhancement would pale against the next day's forty-point increase...
...Parents would be able to take "precisely as much pride in [their child's] achievement as...
...Once the fundamentals of genetic enhancement are understood, biotech-nologists' ability to alter progeny would increase exponentially...
...So what should we do...
...It was designed to produce streak-free glassware, and she was designed to be sweet-tempered, social, and smart...
...And what would become of parental pride in their children's achievements, McKibben asks, once parents became "programmers" and their children "products...
...It could mark an end to truly human freedom...
...Many in his left-leaning audience—particularly the extreme environmentalists— increasingly seem to see the sheer existence of human beings as a blight on the planet...
...This could lead, some techno-skeptics have warned, to the end of all things as the hyperactive assemblers eventually rearrange the molecules of the entire natural world—reducing the planet to a huge soup of "gray goo...
...believing that they possess the wisdom to improve the human species, yearning desperately for corporeal immortality, transhumanists intend to unleash biotechnology, robotic science, and nanotechnology—and thereby recreate life on a superior model of their own imagining...
...McKibben notes that these hazards of posthumanity do not end with the biological...
...On the surface, McKibben admits, this may seem "a deeply attractive picture...
...Therapeutic cloning transforms nascent humans into patentable and marketable medical products...
...power . . . will be a billion times as powerful as all human brains now on the planet...
...The idea that molecular-sized assemblers will someday provide instant cups of tea or suits of clothes, as in a Star Trek movie, seems too fantastical to force alarm about the apocalyptic scenarios that these technologies could cause if they ran out of control...
...In Enough: Staying ^-uman in an Engines-red Age, McKibben sees both the problem and the way in which adherents to the emerging philosophy of "transhuman-ism" fervently want to believe that Science—the capital letter is necessary, for Science is unto them as a jealous and omnipotent god—will be their savior from this mortal conundrum...
...One day "nanobots" might cruise our circulatory systems looking for trouble and making repairs...
...McKibben's answer is in his book's title...
...Driven by an ethos of radical individualism that accepts no restraints and disdains all taboos, hubristically Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute...
...But nanotechnology could also be exceedingly dangerous...
...We should "survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good...
...Robotics, if allowed to get out of control, could result in "conscious" machines...
...But even if he sometimes overstates his case about nanotechnology—at least, I hope he does—McKibben is well worth heeding when he demands that we reexamine our reverence for scientific knowledge as by definition good...
...The human condition stinks, and then we die...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 38
