Content & Context

THE CASE FOR AND AGAINST PERFECTION

So far, the most common arguments against genetic enhancement in reproduction are morally unsatisfying, says Michael Sandel in the cover story of this month’s Atlantic, entitled “The Case Against Perfection.” “I do not think the main problem with enhancement and genetic engineering is that they undermine effort and erode human agency,” writes Sandel, Harvard professor and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. “The deeper danger is that they represent a kind of hyperagency—a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires. The problem is not the drift to mechanism but the drive to mastery.”

The three most serious dangers of genetic engineering, Sandel says, are the loss of humility, the surfeit of responsibility, and the decline of solidarity. Humility, Sandel says, “invites us to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to rein in the impulse to control.” The urge to manipulate our offspring does away with what William May calls an “openness to the unbidden.” Responsibility, meanwhile, stands to swell rather than recede, as “we attribute less to chance and more to choice,” Sandel says. “Today when a basketball player misses a rebound, his coach can blame him for being out of position. Tomorrow the coach may blame him for being too short.” Finally, genetic engineering threatens social solidarity. Currently, we have “a lively sense of the contingency of our gifts,” and, as a result, “people pool their risks and resources and share one another’s fate,” Sandel says. But if the best and brightest see themselves as superior by personal choice rather than random fate, they will feel no obligation to others who presumably failed to act on a similar choice.

As admirable as Sandel’s position is, it never clearly surpasses the anecdotal and ad hoc level of argument he says he laments. Sandel relies too much on what could happen and too little on what must not happen. Restraint is more of a virtue than an ethic; it is preferable but not necessarily a moral imperative. When Sandel notes that “medical intervention to cure or prevent illness or restore the injured to health does not desecrate nature but honors it” and “does not override a child’s natural capacities but permits them to flourish,” he opens a problematic door. He sets up an argument (incorrect, I think, but defensible) that genetic enhancement is also a way of honoring nature, of cultivating the beauty and possibilities of creation. Rather than necessarily forcing us “to see ourselves astride the world” and “banish our appreciation of life as a gift,” no doubt someone will argue that genetic enhancement does the opposite, repairing and enriching our relationship to nature. I don’t buy such an argument, but by failing to frame his views in purely ethical terms, Sandel fails to quash it. If a respected public intellectual can argue (as David Brooks does below) that the waste and incoherence of urban and exurban sprawl is a testament to human ingenuity rather than a failure of it, then we should better prepare for similar self-congratulation over genetic engineering.

Related:
Beyond zero-sum bioethics: a response from TechCentralStation.com
Ellen Goodman on Sandel and Fox’s reality show “The Swan”
Jack or Jill? From the March 2002 Atlantic
Earlier:
‘Designer Babies’ are a myth, says Steven Pinker

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece—Shortly after the sun ignited the Olympic flame in a centuries-old cauldron, Greek javelin thrower Kostas Gatsioudis touched his torch to the fire and sprinted off to become the first of more than 3,600 runners who will carry the Olympic flame through 27 countries on its way to the 2004 Summer Games in Athens. Amid the hurrahs of thousands of Greeks packed on a windswept hillside, Gatsioudis was off and running. But with fewer than five months before the Aug. 13-29 Games, Olympic organizers are still scrambling to meet construction deadlines that can tolerate no further delays while firming up a security plan that can have no holes. … With traditional dancers, a marching band, and seemingly the entire populace of this town gathered under rich blue skies and abundant sunshine at Olympia Stadium, [the opening] event had the feel of a village festival. Athens, though, isn’t quite ready to party. Only 15 of 35 venues are finished.

MEXICO CITY—Ricardo Aguilar hustled down the subway steps one recent morning and pushed through the turnstiles, straight into Mexico City’s newest public library. At nearly two dozen subway stations, officials have begun handing out 1.5 million free books, a novel experiment aimed at promoting literacy and maybe even cutting down on crime. “We hope this can change attitudes and help people get along better,” said … a spokesman for the Metro, which organized the program with financial backing from private businesses and foundations. Cruz said the idea originated in discussions about how to make the subway safer. While some consultants argued for placing armed guards on trains, he said, Metro officials decided to try improving the atmosphere with books instead of guns. Passing time in the underground reading poetry and short stories, Cruz said, is a way “to elevate and promote culture” in a crowded subway system plagued with pickpocketing and sexual groping so rampant that the Metro has separate cars for men and women during rush hours.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• Exurbia is America’s new frontier, an indefinite expanse in which shopping complexes and housing tracts materialize seemingly suddenly—”exploding suburbs,” David Brooks calls them in an excerpt from his new book in the New York Times Magazine. Ninety percent of office space built in America in the 1990s lay outside city limits. But despite their “Zenlike golf ideal,” where everything is “fresh and neat,” Brooks says outer suburbs are centers of dynamic creative energy, not bland conformity. “Far from being dull, artificial and spiritually vacuous, today’s suburbs are the products of the same religious longings and the same deep tensions that produced the American identity from the start,” Brooks writes, bringing in everyone from Jonathan Edwards to Sacvan Bercovitch to bolster his argument. On the smallest scale, the acuity of Brooks’ observations is unmatched, as he describes the snacks at Trader Joe’s and the slacks of exurbanite golfers. But when Brooks zooms out to make a political argument, he makes a patriotic mess. He says the endurance of idealism in our religion, education, and work represents an imaginative energy that contradicts the supposed artificiality of suburban life, and even an “eschatological longing [for] culminating happiness.” But are not the transience and superficiality of American culture actually a failure of these longings, rather than a triumphal realization of them? Full story

Earlier:
Praying for sidewalks and smarter development: B&C Book of the Week
Suburban spirituality and community from Christianity Today
Golf course communities and Manifest Destiny (6th item)

• As though to validate Brooks’ thesis that creativity and suburban life are symbiotic, former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath says that various new novels set in the suburbs “suggest that there are important stories still to be found in the land of the split-level and the McMansion.” After falling out of favor for its vapid setting, “the suburban novel appears to be back.” And no longer bogged down by boredom: Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft is a book of “almost frantic motion.” McGrath is less convincing in this Times piece than in an earlier profile of Lee for the Sunday Magazine that these books have some substance. But his best point is worth quoting; the new suburban novels are “a reminder that the American vision of suburbia has been created by novels and stories at least as much as it has been described by them.” Full story

Related: Review of Aloft from the London Guardian

• More worrisome than urban sprawl is rural sprawl, says the Christian Science Monitor. The once-Wild West is being sliced into “ranchettes” of 35-acres, meeting the minimum for flouting Colorado’s subdivision laws. “We’re watching millions of acres be consumed by ranchettes,” says one environmentalist. “The trend of exurban growth,” the Monitor says, “while more subtle [than urban and suburban], could cause lasting damage to a countryside and culture that’s already disappearing.” Full story

Related:Silos versus subdivisions, also from the Monitor

Speaking of the Wild West, when it comes to law and order, the Internet is not unlike that untamed world. “The online world—for good or ill—is teeming with vigilantes who take matters into their own hands,” says the New York Times . “Self-appointed sheriffs scan eBay and Yahoo auctions looking for fraud. … Private crusaders cruise Internet chat rooms for pedophiles and report their findings to law enforcement—or even expose them online.” Perceiving that law enforcement institutions are too slow or too primitive to keep up with viruses and identify theft, people are prone to what the Times calls “cybervigilantism,” fixing some problems, creating others. Full story
Exurbs, ranchettes, cybervigilantes—it’s all very disorienting, very defiant of a sense of location. It all seems to validate the placeless, nation-less “modern future” once envisioned by utopian futurists, wrote Paul Kingsnorth last year in the New Statesman. “The citizens of nowhere are our new ruling class. Politicians, corporate top dogs, media stars, … Rootless, technocratic, unburdened by the baggage of locality or the complications of history, they exist in every nation but feel attached to none,” Kingsnorth wrote. In a cosmopolitan age, “global citizens” are “casting off the chains of geography and nationality to embrace a global future,” one in which the world is increasingly “the same from Brussels to Bangkok, Sao Paulo to San Diego.” Full story This directly contradicts Franklin Foer’s thesis that says globalization is making people more aware of their local cultures and traditions (discussed earlier here). But maybe the globe is big enough to house both theories at once.
Miscellaneous:Crosscurrents on Richard Rorty – Sven Bikerts on criticism—Remembering A.J. Leibling—Niall Ferguson on the Eurabia that might have been – Chinese Christians’ mission to the Muslim world