Human engineering

One of the biggest challenges humans have ever faced is beginning to confront us. More and more often it is demanded of us, in one country or another, to decide whether there is an ultimate value to the human person. The decision that we will need to make repeatedly during the next 100 years is whether humans ought to allow themselves to be transformed to an extent where a being's humanity is in doubt - though that transformation is promoted as a way of making a person better able to block disease and illness, to perhaps be more intellectually able, to reduce stress. The possibility is that some humans become of the manbearpig kind and will be exploited as deserving less respect. Thereon in there will be classes of humans, with vicious exploitation of "lower" classes being the norm.

Genetically engineered creatures are much on the mind of artist Patricia Piccinini. The Young Family, above,  is from 2003. A later work has a half-human, half-ape wet nurse, one of several works where a "woman" is a controllable artifact.

"Why not make a half a dozen while we at it?" Two forms of human engineering, the cloned and the genetically manipulated.

The media have looked at the implications of cloning for society, but genetic engineering is less often speculated about. It's easier to go down the cyborg path in portraying the human future. But Michel Houellebecq's Atomised (*) does explore an existence of a new human race without individuality - as everyone shares the same engineered genetic code. The French novelist, poet, and provocateur, to use John Updike's description, portrays a new solely rational species, and one that no longer relies on sexuality for reproduction.

The most terrifying element of this future is that the people would accept the transformation because they believed the solution to every problem was a technical one - science would deliver a world where there was no egotism, cruelty or anger. On that account, in search of an easy life, the people capitulate, allowing the loss of personal freedom, dignity, and the desire for truth and beauty. People become disposable so that one "neohuman" can annihilate a lesser creature with “the sensation of accomplishing a necessary and legitimate act”, as Houellebecq puts it in a later novel that Updike discusses.

Updike concludes by questioning the quality of the "neohuman" future, "a world [...]  that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last".

The ease with which a "neohuman" future could entrap humankind was shown in the push for universal availability of abortion, just when humanity took pride in sweeping away the legalized racism of the United States and South Africa. Another round of confusion is over the "right to die", which Updike refers to, and euthanasia, the path to final victimization. Humans are apt to take the easy option, and World War II especially  shows disappointingly how moral development does have its reversals.

Also, unwary humans could find ourselves where we did not set out to go. If we look at the travails of Monsanto in 2009-2010 we find it has big problems as weeds "learn" to cope with its herbicides and its genetically modified soybeans have not performed as well as expected. So things don't always go to plan in the world of genetic engineering. Likewise there are dangers in scientists creating human embryos to harvest stems cells, all for a good cause, but in the process treating the living human being as just something to be used and discarded, despite all the oversight committees.

Scientists don't want to accept limits even though there are other avenues to proceed along to get stem cells. That widespread, though not universal, refusal to accept limits is in contrast with the soul-searching that went on among the Manhattan Project team developing the atom bomb. American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was not afraid to air his doubts as to the morality of the assignment, and after the war, on the risk of an arms race, which, of course, eventuated. 

In brief, there is an urgent need for humans to be humble, and to learn from the evidence from all around us, of the mistakes we make. The evidence proves we are not masters, but stewards of our world, and that includes of our own destiny. 

(*)Vintage 2001, translated from Les Particules élémentaires