-Caveat Lector-
>From www.morrock.com/tech.htm
> Huxley's hatcheries
>
> By MICHAEL R. ALIX
> TMNS Technology Editor
> July 14, 1999
>
>
>
>
> Aldous Huxley, often mistakenly taken for a science fiction
> writer, did write at least one science fiction book, Brave New
> World (1932). That was almost seventy years ago, when
> bio-engineering was just a glint in a scientist's eye. Today, the
> hatcheries of Brave New World are closer to reality.
>
> While we endure the growth of the Internet, we look to its
> generational cousin as a work of horror, Frankenstein's hobby
> revisited, and wonder where it will lead. While bits attain some
> kind of clarity in our minds as information packets as
> decipherable as the semantic folios of the library of Babylon,
> genes, DNA, and embryos retain much of their gelatinous mystery,
> as goo that's formless and indecipherable outside of cyclotrons
> and laboratory vials.
>
> And yet, this goo is shedding its mysteries, promising a Brave
> New World more harrowing than the open society of the Net. The
> specter of eugenics, which raised its head in Huxley's time, when
> Huxley's grandpa was still "Darwin's Bulldog" and when the
> British elite could dream up the bio-engineered paradise/hells of
> Brave New World, The Time Machine, and The Island of Doctor
> Moreau, raises its head anew.
>
> Brave New World begins with a "walk-through" of a modern human
> hatchery, where embryos are coaxed to split over and over again
> to produce hundreds of genetic twins. In today's laboratories,
> the same effect can be achieved through cloning. The British
> dreamers foresaw that the point to engineering life might not be
> a better human race, but a safer and happier one. After eons of
> warring and killing, history is a bad dream that the new world
> wants to awaken from.
>
> Do we need such an awakening? The fruits are tempting. Life
> hitherto has been a license for brutes to mistreat their progeny,
> to breed viviparously (randomly), and to raise differences among
> people that can be exploited for their destruction. The happy,
> the peaceful, the satisfied, and the healthy are less prone to
> the resentments that mollify moral monsters such as Caligula,
> Hitler, and Stalin. That's not to say that only the discontented
> do evil, but that a happier humanity might be less prone to such
> temptations. Is eugenics really so scary?
>
> Arguably, democracy, with its attendant ideology "demodoxy," the
> belief in averageness -- in time-tested values, in the pure forms
> of immortal ideas -- leads to a eugenics of sorts. So does power
> lust, the ideology to win-win, achieve success at all cost -- in
> short, the elitism of people who feel that by their culture or by
> their birthright, they are privileged. Oddly, the same will to
> privilege seems to have embolded both hereditary aristocracies
> and terrorist fraternities in the past. And nationalism, in many
> respects, resembles a terrorist fraternity. Consider, in passing,
> the qualms of the American founding fathers, who feared
> sectarianism would render their political machine a whim of
> history, and who did all they could to equilibrate it.
>
> There will come a time, as we begin to think about the new
> artifices that science is bringing to our societies, when we will
> have to decide that progress means perhaps a co-existence of
> artificial forms and natural ones, of eugenics and random
> selection. If we can decimate genetic disease, we may also
> provide some strengths to the genome that will render it stronger
> in other ways than merely counteracting disease. We may want to
> live longer, for example, or guarantee a range of propensities to
> the people whom we launch into a future that won't be ours.
>
> Do we want -- or will they want -- health and happiness? Do we
> want longevity? Do we want a better guarantee of social
> acceptance and adaptation to the functions of the real world?
> These are not flighty questions, nor are they best left to
> experts. They are a matter for present reflection -- before our
> own Brave New World, for better or for worst, dawns upon us.
>
>
>
> Related Link:
>
> Brave New World? A Defense of Paradise-Engineering
http://www.huxley.net/
A<>E<>R
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