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The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.In the short book The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, by Michael J. Sandel, 2007, the author reflects on the attitudes that inspire the “antis” to reject genetic enhancements. By parsing what he states and how he states it, it becomes apparent that there is no substance to this argument. It is mystic, not substantive. Sandel states:
It simply does not follow that “human mastering” in any way destroys “appreciation”—either of the process or that which is altered. He continues:
It could be equally argued that life is devoid of giftedness or meaning since it evolved without purpose. Humans just happened to have evolved to a level where they can—if they wish—take some control over their own evolution in order to improve their lives, experiment with what can be, or just to enjoy the intellectual or scientific experience. Humans, contrary to the critics, need not be constrained by any notions of that which “reaches beyond religion.” For a scientific materialist, this language is vacuous and unconvincing. Some may embrace static existence as they wish, but they will be relegated to the sidelines as they watch the rest of humanity master their own existence. He goes on to explain how taking an active role in designing one’s child—as if choosing a mate and the child’s environment does not already count for at least some attempt at design—will “disfigure” the relation between child and parent. Then he seems to reveal his real objection:
The common thread in the arguments against genetic enhancement is the fear that it will destroy egalitarianism. Firmly bound within the dire warnings in these “anti” books is a fear that people will turn against universalism and turn towards gated communities where like-minded people will be concerned only with their own genetic interests.
This seems to be the primary fear against genetic enhancement—a return to particularism where resources are targeted towards our own kind rather to the other who will increasingly be less like us than before. Accelerated evolution will increase the genetic gap between “us” and “them.” When parental investment was limited to environmental enhancements, resources were less important as the community paid for education, religious indoctrination, athletic programs, and basic health care. Now, genetic enhancements require—if your child is to rise above all the rest—an increasing amount of money to provide those technological marvels that will be driven by profit and not a shared community concern. This new community will have little interest in sharing with the world what there will be little left over to share, as the need for surrogate mothers becomes more important than the health of third-world mothers.
And the egalitarian dogma will erode and disappear as people reflect on their own advancement and what to do with those who have been completely left behind as obsolete humans. Now any enhancement will be earned by a dominion of technology. Sandel makes the interesting point that medical/genetic enhancement differs from medicine proper in that medicine intervenes in nature only to restore normality—it does not go beyond “restoration” to “improvement” over what we were allotted genetically. However, this constraint is not because we have chosen it, but rather we have been limited by it. Humans have always had an interest in bettering themselves however they can—cosmetic surgery, performance enhancing drugs, beauty aids, exercise—most people at least desire improvement even if they do not exercise the effort needed for substantial gains. There are no natural boundaries between a desire for normalcy and a desire for perfection—I for one will take whatever is available at the time without inordinate efforts to achieve diminishing results (lifting weights for an hour a day, but not for eight hours a day). Sandel’s message then is simple:
For billions of years, organisms have altered their genetics in order to survive in a changing world. Organisms that failed to do so died out. The others lived on in an uninterrupted chain of alterations. What would be unnatural, if one could even think in terms of a natural/unnatural dichotomy when it comes to evolution, would be for humans to try and change their nature socially rather than genetically where the latter is possible. Also note how the Left embraces human submission to nature, even (at the extreme) exhorting us to give up technology and slither back into a cave in order to live in harmony with nature. Yet Sandel turns this motivation on its head by arguing that humans should now alter their social structure in order to “fit the world.” I cannot really make sense of what he means by such an assertion. Humans, like all organisms have an innate motivation to survive and procreate, though we also have the ability to over-ride many of our desires (when we desire to). There is no RIGHT way for humans to behave. Genetic enhancement is just another technology. Every book that I have read opposing free-market genetic enhancement for those who wish it argues in one or both of two ways. First, if we are to genetically improve the human genome then the improvements must be made available to everyone equally. Second, we should prevent genetic enhancement because humans should alter their way of interacting with each other rather than changing their nature—that is, we should let socialism solve all of our problems. Both therefore are egalitarian arguments. According to the Left, genetic interests must extend to the entire human species. No particular race may advance ahead of any other. Too bad that is not how this is going to unfold. Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 04:45 PM in Eugenics Comments:2
Posted by Frank on August 06, 2009, 10:34 PM | #
Plenty about transhumanism; nothing about Europe or Europeans. Richard Lynn is apparently one too. Good article at The Scorpion in part warning of the moral issues involved:
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Posted by the Narrator... on August 07, 2009, 02:05 AM | # As usual the leftys want it both ways. What is telling though is that the social engineering the left advocates is, for all intents and purposes, a form of genetic engineering. It’s just that in that case the direction is downward instead of up. ... 4
Posted by c on August 07, 2009, 02:39 AM | # “This is a sneaky appeal to this audience. GE could also potentially allow for the elimination of inequality, in addition to heritage. GE would allow man to “transcend” race, because all would equally be of the untouchable class.” Absolutely. The establishment is waiting for the technology to improve Negroid IQ before spilling the beans about their inferiority. Or worse, engineer for a Negroid advantage. The establishment is a vicious beast with a subconcious lack of concern for white well-being. This is why wnism is vital. We must not remain quite about white safety as we were when Negroids were burning down our cities in the sixties. 5
Posted by c on August 07, 2009, 02:45 AM | # People believe Transhumanism will be the End of History. Well, this was said also of liberal democracy in the early 1990s. Opps. Didn’t happen. Whenever a significant advance in intelligence becomes available-decades away-the white people left will need a pit-bull to fend off the jealous, vindictive browns and ensure we get a fair shake. 6
Posted by Frank on August 07, 2009, 03:12 AM | # C, I think you’re referring to “ex-neocon” Fukuyama whose book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (wiki) declared man might no longer be facing what Fukuyama had previously called the “End of History” (liberal democracy as the final stage of societal evolution) because man might [relatively] soon alter humanity itself beyond recognition. 7
Posted by c on August 07, 2009, 09:38 AM | # Yes I am. And Fukuyama’s predictions of an end to war and competition and all of those interesting things did not come to fruition as planned. So therefore to think race or politics will become irrelevant is probably wrong-headed too. 8
Posted by Frank on August 07, 2009, 10:07 AM | # Transgenetic monkeys produce offspring Buy GloFish (transgenetic fish-jellyfish hybrids) at most any pet store that carries fish. Though the genes aren’t passed down, Gene therapy is already in use for curing genetic diseases. The enormous complexity of the human genome might never be fully “mastered” or at least not anytime soon. However, understanding isn’t needed for trial and error. 9
Posted by Søren Renner on August 07, 2009, 11:51 AM | # I congratulate you, Dr. Nuenke, on yet another excellent book review. 10
Posted by Re:Frank on August 08, 2009, 02:58 AM | # Frank - are you a Judeo-Christian or something? 11
Posted by kurt9 on August 08, 2009, 10:32 PM | # I understand why designer babies are a contentious issue but I fail to understand the hang up with competent adults using technology to modify their own bodies. Many people undergo cosmetic surgery and work out in the gym. I fail to see the BFD about the same people using somatic cell gene therapy for the same purposes. It really all the same. I understand the issue with regards to professional sports. However, in regular life adult transformation is no big deal. I think the author is one of these anal-retentive a**hole types who makes it his business to complain about other peoples’ personal choices. 12
Posted by Frank on August 09, 2009, 01:16 AM | # “Frank - are you a Judeo-Christian or something?” No. I’m just not asleep on this issue. Are you one of these people who believes there is no soul in man nor meaning in life and who has no loyalty to kith nor kin? I have no respect for “clanless, hearthless outlaw[s]”. 13
Posted by Sherman on August 10, 2009, 06:34 PM | # Dr. Nuenke has had a major influence on the way I see issues and possible solutions, and the more I learn about genetics and behavior, the more I am convinced that GE is the only humane solution. Thanks, Matt, for your insights and your writings. 14
Posted by Frank on August 10, 2009, 08:17 PM | # If making the pathos appeal, this technology would require decades of trial and error in which mistakes would be made. You’d have children growing up with unforeseen extreme abnormalities. Eugenics is possible without GE. If one thinks on the basis of our moral system and from whence morality is derived in our societies, then the real dilemma becomes apparent. But if only focusing on pathos, many would suffer to develop this technology. 15
Posted by Steven E. Romer on August 11, 2009, 05:28 AM | # I find it interesting that this nonsensical book by Mr. Michael J. Sandel tried to say that eugenics is against religion. Religion is OBVIOUSLY intensely concerned with the genetic trajectory of the race. In fact, according to mt book “The Textbook of the Universe: The Genetic Ascent to God”, it can be shown that religion is much like alchemy used to be—a way of speaking about forces in nature we do not know enough about yet that tends to be mystical and somewhat nebulous. Religion is all about genetics and eugenics—the long-term patterns in human society that lead to building and harmony rather than destruction and death. There are facts underlying the religious or mystical talk used in religions, and we need to talk about the facts before we can say fully what they are because they are important and powerful. In alchemy, this lead naturally to chemistry. Religion leads naturally to Eugenics. In my book I show that the whole explosion of science has been toward taking over from nature in the “natural selection” department. Religion talks about breeding, eating, what we can and cannot do, who deserves condemnation or death even. All these things are a EUGENIC PROGRAM. Many become entirely explicit—like the Caste system in India. Religion creates an artificial environment in which certain people are selected for (the pious and non-sinful) and others are not (stoning or killing infidels). It is laughable in the extreme that he says “An appreciation of the giftedness of life constrains the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility. It is, in part, a religious sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion.”. The author also talks about Eugenics as if it were somehow optional? It isn’t. Eugenics MADE us! How moral is it to ignore the very process that made us human? With the constant introduction of noise into the genetic code, without our intervention to restore healthy selection we are doomed. We HAVE to do it—it is like breathing and eating. Eugenics is the future, it is natural, and it is even holy. We already do it (with laws and prison systems which take people out of the breeding pool)—making it conscious will just make the world and the future staggeringly better. From the standpoint of truth, we can make the world a more fertile ground for objective truth by increasing IQ and the motivation for truth. Everything good—freedom, justice, even true love itself requires truth. There is no charity on Earth potentially as powerful as Eugenics. It rightly should be the new universal foundation of all religion and science—the keystone where they finally meet. 16
Posted by Steven E. Romer on August 11, 2009, 07:18 AM | # Recently the Pope condemned the concentration camps as a symbol of evil. Here is an interesting reply from Stormfront.org which speaks of eugenics as the ultimate moral good and the corruption of churches also. Very good post.: The concentration camps were a symbol of rooting out evil – they were the triumph of good, just as our prisons for criminals today are a good thing. We must protect the innocent from meta-criminals above all—criminality so huge it is difficult to see. They are much more destructive of the future, and the soul of our people, than any simple robber or murderer. The camps were just an aspect of the final battles of truly objectively good Nazis against the corruption and utter destruction of the world flowing from mainly Jews at the time. We put enemy combatants in prisons too. After the Civil war, tens of thousands died in prison camps which were much worse than any concentration camp – from dysentery and starvation. They who died there were not even evil. That is something to be truly sad about—so are the gulags in which so many millions of good idealistic people perished and were actually ordered murdered in the Soviet Union. Most people cannot see clearly what good and evil are. They are better off being told by superiors. Problem is, the Jews and some select others have a deep instinctual dislike of everything good. If your path is evil, good can stop you if it has the resources and minds supporting it. It is an age-old conflict of patterns we see in nature too—as when a blind virus attacks an aware and conscious being because of it’s pooled resources. There is a continuum of being able to see good and evil. At one end are the animals, with their more here-and-now and somewhat instinctual ideas of what is good and evil. Our own retarded people and many of the insane also are at that end of the spectrum. There is nothing either good or evil in the world but that thinking makes it so. Good requires great minds, incorruptible minds, objective minds. What allows you to truly become immune to evil is knowledge—the flaming sword of truth. You cannot even begin to be good, to know good, without at the most basic level being able to analyze and question your own ideas, your own beliefs. The only other way is to listen to someone else who does (thus we have religion). We pick up many beliefs from the world around us from conditioning—the pairing of animal urges and fears with other things (as in school, and in the media). Only by amassing objective knowledge of the world and how it is constructed, by seeing the lessons of nature and the universe we live in, can we begin to see the meaning of life and the real definition of good and evil written large within it by the eternal creative forces in the universe. Evil is dark, ignorant, and corrupt with selfish desires formed in a single lifetime based on perversions of ill-understood biological urges. Sexual perversions get all the press, but most of these are relatively harmless compared with greed, fear, and lust for power perversions which can destroy nations and people forever. Evil does not question or see the wonder played out in the history of life of these urges in moderation—evil wants power because it is driven and is a slave to these urges like the animals are. Good is light, full of objective powerful knowledge, self-reflective and self-criticizing. It pays special attention to timeless patterns (like the ascetic monk Gregor Mendel studying the patterns of his pea plants). Good is seeing the lesson of the timeless for your own life and people – lessons which if they are not followed will be the eventual destruction of his people. Science today is a wellspring of knowledge of the timeless – from the interaction of elements in chemistry to the interaction of heavenly bodies swinging through silent empty space. It can show us dangers, errors of our ways which if left unchecked WILL destroy us. This knowledge is a requirement for our salvation, our very existence. We must have the strength and fighting spirit to do the truly hard things required by this knowledge. All else is sin and death. Studying the trajectories of our minds and peoples is at least as important as studying the motions of planets. I cannot imagine a true Pope who does not love and cherish science. Naturally if you do, you would love and cherish the people on the Earth who invented it as a systematic externalization of how their finest minds worked. You would see that it was a blessing and a miracle by which we can verify the products of our greatest spirits – making a religion of peace that all can agree on. A religion of life, light, and objective (undistorted by human urges and blindness) knowledge. If you consider these things, then you will see clearly that good does not always win. Good is at a disadvantage. It is easy to destroy, easy to lie, but difficult to face the truth, difficult in the extreme to fill your mind with truth above all the cacophony and chaos of life. It is difficult to build. It is difficult to fly up from the Earth in mind, spirit, and in machine – but we as humans who love knowledge can do it. It is only in the last few hundred years that science has exploded on the scene. It was flowering everywhere with the ideas of our salvation – eugenics was flowering in every western nation, leaving ignorance and evil little place to hide from the omniscience of the new genetic knowledge. Then those who love evil, are filled with lusts and greed, saw their death knell in it, and began to fight it like a desperate criminal with hostages does—barricaded inside our civilization. That is how we came to WW1 and WW2 – and the communist revolutions surrounding these times. The Jews won WW2—killing millions who were aware. At the end they crucified every man left they could find who could see, who led the people in righteousness. They were removed from universities, hung at Nuremburg, starved in prison camps. I believe we are truly seeing the final battles of good and evil as never before in the history of the Earth. Good is only just emerging from the chrysalis of history in us now after many unsuccessful starts. It never could get started in Africa. It is our time, but is delicate and vulnerable. The promise is in the white race. By objective standards, the Germans of WW2 were unquestionably the good guys in the sense that they had their hearts firmly set on goodness above all – they sacrificed all unselfishly for these ideals. They are the ones who stuck with goodness til they bled, til their holy blood flowed through their cities on fire like rivers of tears from the eyes of God. They were absolute heroes of the billion-year history of life on Earth, and we were duped to help destroy them – not knowing the evil we were doing, trusting too much those who did not know, see, or care what they were doing. We were like children led over a cliff into the dark oblivion, fighting what they put in front of us to fight because our instincts were set up more for battle than reflection. For politics rather than truth. We did not question our beliefs; we did not know how our opinions were formed, how our instincts of enemy and camaraderie were conditioned to the wrong things like dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. That bell is a death knell. It tolls for thee. The pope calling the Nazi camps a symbol of evil is because of that bell. It is our doom. The only way we have a chance is to spread the truth, to open people’s eyes and remove their conditioning. Without eugenics, and with the dysgenic patterns of reproductive choices we have been making, this will be a tall order. I thought the catholic church was against abortion, but not when it comes to the birth of a god-like people on Earth to end corruption I guess. We go through the motions of goodness, our emotions shunted into ineffectual pursuits to stop Earthly abortions, while the cosmic birth of our people is being aborted by those who would enslave and darken the Earth forever. We must save ourselves despite the fear and blindness of the churches, despite the selfish feel-good charities that divert and obscure the real and only true long-term charities in eugenics. Eugenics spending would increase in value over time, as the people lifted themselves up and solved all problems that require charity. We are being destroyed by these false idols while the miracle and spirit of our people is being enslaved and destroyed. It should be nurtured like a delicate rare flower—protected and enhanced with the full power of our divine knowledge of the universe. It is time to rise up and put a stop to all of this – to straighten out the path we are on, to lift our brothers out of the pit where they toil in vain. It is time to be men again, men of the creator. Though I pray for the Pope, we don’t need a Pope, we don’t need weakness and death, Gott Mit Uns!! Next entry: “Nazis”, “Brownshirts” and the “Violent” Town Hall Meeting on Healthcare Previous entry: The Cult of Multi-Culturalism |
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Posted by Frank on August 06, 2009, 08:46 PM | #
It’s dangerous for pro-white sites to focus on IQ and white superiority and post-modernism because white activists then grow confused and embrace trends like GE.
Altering our genetic heritage would have similar results to mixing all the races. This article is anti-white prop.
It obviously does follow. Were GE to “master” technology for biomachines to replace humans, there’d be no moral system for man to work within because every part of society would be fluid and temporary.
This is a sneaky appeal to this audience. GE could also potentially allow for the elimination of inequality, in addition to heritage. GE would allow man to “transcend” race, because all would equally be of the untouchable class.
Since when is this a part of the “Left”? The Left is assocated with the Cult of Reason. You only use “Left” here to appeal to this audience.
Would you as a man of the “Right” value more a high IQ mutt or a pure blood Nordic?
This is the best argument GE proponents have, but what could also happen is the magicians could destroy themselves in the process, while a proud ethno-state might endure. And the unity and sense of being held by the ethno-state could allow for great power as a state unit that could overwhelm meaningless biotrash created in labs.
A man of true will wouldn’t embrace a technology simply because it’s inevitable. If he cared for his race, he’d fight to defend its “static existence”.
Rather the opposite: an end of particularism. True particularism is the caring for one’s own because it is one’s own. Within a healthy nation normal eugenics is practiced, but that doesn’t necessitate the killing off of the weak. The weak and elderly and sick are cared because they are all parts of the nation, or community or family or other particular group.
Only a monster like yourself would see caring for one’s own as wrong.