The "Natural" versus "Enhancement"

There's an old debate in futurist communities about what our bodies will look like in the future. Will we have free license to alter them at will? Are there going to be people with tails, people with scales, people with metal appendages walking around the streets in the future?

Certain bioconservatives have claimed that "Regarding the use of performance-enhancing techniques, especially in competitive activities, concerns can be raised about unfair advantage and inauthentic performance." In fact, there was an entire report of the US President's Council on Bioethics called Beyond Therapy:Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, from which this quote is taken.

The President's Council goes on:

Superior performance is pursued in a myriad of human activities. The athlete strives to run faster, the student to know more, the soldier to shoot more accurately, the vocalist to sing more musically, the chess-player to play with greater mastery. Our motives for seeking superior performance are varied and complex, as human desire and human aspiration always are. We seek to win in competition, to advance in rank and status, to increase our earnings, to please others and ourselves, to gain honor and fame, or simply to flourish and fulfill ourselves by being excellent in doing what we love. In pursuing superior performance, human beings have long sought advantages obtainable from better tools and equipment, better training and practice, and better nutrition and exercise. Today, and increasingly tomorrow, we may also find help in new technological capacities for directly improving our bodies and minds—both their native powers and their activities—capacities provided by drugs, genetic modifications, and surgical procedures (including the implantation of mechanical devices). What should we think about obtaining superior performance through the use of such biotechnologies?

Given their conservative bent, you can likely guess their answer. The report continues:

And, attending to the special issues raised by the use of bio-engineered enhancements, we would need to address these central questions: As we discover new and better ways to “improve” our given bodies, minds, and performance, are we changing or compromising the dignity of human activity? Are we becoming too reliant on “expert chemists” for our achievements? Do such potential enhancements alter the identity of the doer? Whose performance is it, and is it really better? Is the enhanced person still fully me, and are my achievements still fully mine? Have I been enhanced in ways that are in fact genuinely better and humanly better? And, beyond these questions regarding individuals, we would need to consider the implications for society should such uses of biotechnology become widespread—in school, at work, or in athletics, warfare, or other competitive activities.

First, note the use of the word "given" in relation to bodies. To have our bodies be "given" requires a giver, making our bodies a "gift" (wording used repeatedly throughout this report). There is, clearly, a religious understanding of givenness here, though implicit, that cannot be denied. The implication is that we are what God has made us, and to attempt to alter that is to somehow "compromise the dignity of human activity". While the President's Council seems to know what this dignity of human activity is (presumably something both natural and related to our own human nature) I certainly do not.

The Council goes on:

In athletics, as in so many other areas of human life, practice and training are the most important means for improving performance, and superior performance is most generally attained through better training: the direct improvement of the specific powers and abilities of the human agent at-work-in-the-world, by means of his self-conscious or self-directed effort, exercise, and activity. To train is to be at work: striving, seeking, pushing, laboring, and developing. It requires self-knowledge or external guidance about the ends worth seeking, and it requires the desire and discipline to pursue those ends through one’s own effort. And, most importantly for our purposes, training means acquiring by practice and effort improvements in the very powers and abilities that training uses. One gets to run faster by running; one builds up endurance by enduring; one increases one’s strength by using it on ever-increasing burdens. The capacity to be improved is improved by using it; the deed to be perfected is perfected by doing it.

This insight has some important implications. First, it calls our attention to the very real differences in our natural endowments. If improving through training proceeds as described, certain native abilities are often a prerequisite. In many cases, no amount of training can overcome the unchangeable shortcomings of natural gifts. Second, and more important for present purposes, the source of our different endowments may be mysterious, but our active cultivation of those endowments, whether great or small, is intelligible: we can understand the connection between effort and improvement, between activity and experience, between work and result.

This leads to an important difference between improvements made through training and improvements gained through bioengineering. When and if we use our mastery of biology and biotechnology to alter our native endowments—whether to make the best even better or the below- average more equal—we paradoxically make improvements to our performance less intelligible, in the sense of being less connected to our own self-conscious activity and exertion. The improvements we might once have made through training alone, we now make only with the assistance of artfully inserted IGF-1 genes or anabolic steroids. Though we might be using rational and scientific means to remedy the mysterious inequality or unchosen limits of our native gifts, we would in fact make the individual’s agency less humanly or experientially intelligible to himself.

So while they do, in fact, note that there are "very real differences in our natural endowments," their argument against enhancement (a word I'm loathe to use, but will do so for the sake of coherence with their own wording) is that it makes the "individual's agency less humanly... intelligible to himself." Again, I have no idea what it means for my agency to be intelligible to myself, or how biotechnological enhancement somehow compromises this more than training or natural luck would.

I bring this up first because I was subjected to hours upon hours of watching this year's Tour de France (I can respect that my friends cycle, but I cannot understand why anyone would actually watch cycling!) As many of you may already know, this year's winner has been accused of using performance enhancers. (And please excuse me if the link changes at some point - CNN has a nasty habit of inserting completely new stories into previous URLs). Although it's too early to say whether this is just another case of people refusing to accept an American winning the Tour (Lance Armstrong was accused of doping by the same lab that has reported a positive test for this year's winner, Floyd Landis, and eventually cleared of all charges), what interests me about this entire thing is Landis' defense. The positive test showed high levels of testosterone in Landis' blood, and Landis insists that it is a natural occurence - his body simply produces more testosterone than other people. He claims:

This is not a doping case, but a natural occurrence," the 30-year-old American cyclist told reporters at the news conference. "I declare convincingly and categorically that my winning the Tour de France has been exclusively due to many years of training and my complete devotion to cycling."

I'm beyond intrigued here. So he has amazingly high levels of testosterone naturally in his blood (testosterone which allegedly aids in speedy muscle recovery, making his impossible comeback in stage 17 and his ability to ride at all the next day possible). Yet, in spite of this "natural endowment," he attributes his win to training and the love of the sport, not the fact that other people lack his amazing recovery ability.

This became even more questionable when it was reported that an Olympic medal-winning runner also tested positive for high levels of testosterone recently. I'm much less familiar with this case, but I actually watched Floyd Landis make a miracle comeback in the Tour and joked at the time that "he must've gone home and doped after he dropped back so far in the race," a claim I could make jokingly and without guilt after so many racers were thrown out just days before the start of the race for doping.

So what does it mean for the debate on biotechnological enhancement if, as these men claim, they have naturally high levels of testosterone and have not cheated at all? I can certainly believe it - but it should bring into sharp highlight the fact that all this talk of natural human dignity and hard work is not necessarily the relevant factor in what builds a champion. We like to tell an inspiring story about our lives, and especially in America we hold athletes up as the protagonists of these stories. Yet all the narrative eloquence in the world cannot rewrite the fact that these individuals are quite possibly born with an advantage that can only be rivaled by biotechnological means in other individuals.

The question that is always asked is then, how can we reward them for their accomplishments if all we've done is given them EPO or pumped them full of steroids? But my question is, and always has been, how can we reward any athlete that happens to be born with all of the advantages for athleticism? All the hard work in the world is not going to win me the Tour de France, ever (not that women can even compete...) So, is the question of reward even relevant in the debate about human enhancement? As the President's Council put it, "concerns can be raised about unfair advantage and inauthentic performance" - but I would say these concerns are raised before biotechnology ever enters into the picture.

Cross-posted to Hyper-textual Ontology

Review: A Short History of the Future

A Short History of the Future, by W. Warren Wagar

In his fictional account of the next 200 years, historian W. Warren Wagar outlines a plausible technoprogressive future. Perhaps more overtly leftist than many mainstream progressives would prefer, his future nonetheless encapsulates the criticisms of capitalist globalization they share.

Briefly, Wagar postulates the continued dominance of multinational corporations, culminating in the formation of a "super-WTO" called the Global Trade Consortium wielding enough economic influence to coerce even superpowers such as the Soviet Union (the book was initially written in 1989) to acquiesce to its wishes. Eventually, the GTC's capitalist boom results in a capitalist bust during the 2030s, followed by international rivalry and posturing, and ultimately the Catastrophe of 2044, global nuclear war. In the aftermath of World War III, as the global South takes on the role of the core and the North the periphery, a new order emerges, a democratic socialist regime called the Commonwealth. With time, technology allows the dissolution in 2159 of even this egalitarian government, and the House of Earth is the result -- utopian anarchy in which communities organize as they wish, independent and dependent upon each other only to the extent that they desire.

The book really presents one dystopia (the current system) and two utopias, and while chronologically the anarchist vision follows the democratic socialist, the socialist utopia is not portrayed as inferior or the anarchist as preferable. The interesting thing about both of these utopias is that they represent two great technoprogressive strands that are in some way opposed, but in others can work in parallel: large-scale public works and technoliberating decentralization.

The socialist Commonwealth is capable of achieving projects that would be generally impossible without some sort of centralization. They create a Planetary Restoration Authority to oversee the reversal of the significant damage caused by global warming, among other things reclaiming a flooded Florida and Bangladesh. They bring incomes to within a 2:1 ratio of rich to poor, and mandate gender and racial equity worldwide. A space solar power system is put into place, generating free energy for the world. Finally, they launch a Genetic Initiative for "enhancement" biotechnology; after a brief period of random lottery, the treatments are made available to all prospective parents.

The anarchist utopia founded by the Small party movement, in contrast, maximizes liberty for individuals and groups, but requires a much greater technological base. House-sized antimatter generators allow communities energy independence; the SPS system is discontinued as centralized and vulnerable. Advanced bio- and nanotechnology gives communities and households the ability to be entirely self-sufficient if they wish. Cultures can be as open or closed as desired; while this has the downside of allowing repressive societies to exist, there are no shortage of novel experiments in democracy and polyarchy and anarchy. Finally, since voluntary collaboration is certainly still possible, confederations manage to launch interstellar missions and terraform Mars.

Whether or not one agrees with the specific choices Wagar makes in his exploration of a possible future, the sheer depth of that exploration makes A Short History of the Future a valuable source of inspiration -- outrage at our present condition, amazement at the possibilities -- for any progressive.

A discussion of the more political aspects of Wagar's book can be found in the Journal of World-Systems Research, here.

"[Bush] Thinks Murder Is Wrong." (But Has a Funny Way of Showing It)

[via the Center for American Progress] Today, a reporter asked Press Secretary Tony Snow why Bush opposed the bill [to expand funding for stem-cell research -- a Bill that passed 63-37 (not enough to override the Veto that America's Worst President in History promises will be, surreally, the very first of his catastophic and criminal Administration)]. Snow responded, “The simple answer is he thinks murder is wrong.”

As ThinkProgress points out: "An embryo is not a baby or even a fetus; it’s a cluster of about 150 cells, also known as a blastocyst, which forms a few days after the joining of a sperm and egg, and is no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Stem cells are derived from the center of this cluster, and are like biological blank slates. They have the potential to become any of the 200 kinds of cells that make up the human body. [And i]n any event, the embryos at issue are currently being discarded."

It's always interesting (in an utterly desolating kinda sorta way) to see what a "murder is wrong" commitment looks like when it froths from the mouth of a pro-war, pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, pro-mercury in drinking water, pro-staffing FEMA with incompetents, pro-depleted Uranium weapons proliferatin', pro-climate change denyin' neocon/theocon brainless bloodthirsty bullying bigot like George W. Bush.

Crossposted from Amor Mundi

When Meat Culture Meets Cultured-Meat

An article that appeared last week in AlterNet, written by Traci Hukill, sounded a strong warning about the prospect of laboratory-produced “cultured meat” substitutes to animal corpses as food, and the piece has attracted widespread attention. As a longtime ethical vegetarian who has written on this topic before, Hukill’s piece certainly attracted my own attention.

The title of Hukill’s piece takes the form a question: “Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat?” Although one quickly gets the impression that this question is a rhetorical one for Hukill, and that the article pretty much assumes that the prospect of “Lab-Grown” meat will inspire almost universal revulsion in its largely progressive AlterNet readership, what we discover from a survey of the reader-comments inspired by the piece that actually appear alongside it is that few people share Hukill’s bioconservative assumptions at all. I’ll discuss some of these comments, and their implications for my emerging technoprogressive mainstream thesis, in a moment. But first, I want to take a closer look at Hukill’s piece itself.

“As I type these words,” the article begins, “men and women of science are growing meat in a laboratory.” Although this opening snapshot is probably intended to highlight from the get-go the urgency of what Hukill takes to be an emerging atrocity, it crucially highlights the fact that this is not a fantastic or science-fictional but a proximate real-world development. Hukill goes on to point out that this “growing meat” is not “hatched or born. It doesn't graze, walk or breathe. But it is alive. It sits growing in a room where somebody has called it into existence with a pipette and syringe.” Presumably, this conjuration of alienness inspires shudders of repugnance in Hukill. But for me it raises questions and inspires hopes.

While I feel the force of Hukill’s “But it is alive” here quite as surely as I am meant to do, the fact is that there is a difference between what I mean when I say that a cow is alive and when I say that broccoli is alive, and this is a difference that makes a difference to me as an ethical vegetarian making choices about my own eating practices. Everything Hukill is saying here, apart from using the term “meat” in the first place to describe this food product, locates “grown-meat” closer to the ethical location where I place broccoli now than the one where I place cows. And nothing about a “pipette and syringe” changes that assignment, since I know well enough that all agriculture, including the long history of cultivation practices that have brought us what we now regard as “broccoli,” is technoscientific through and through. Indeed, even in my most stridently vegan organic revolutionary moods (yes, I have them occasionally) I turn to technoscientifically literate intervention to provide the superorganic foodstuffs for an agricultural practice that could feed actual real-world populations in a healthy and sustainable way (rather than the romanticized post-genocidal die-off fantasies of diminished population that “naturalists” would need to impose their nostalgic feudalist fantasies of technophobic sustainability).

"Cultured meat," writes Hukill, “is supposed to save us from the execrable pollution and guilt of factory farms while still allowing all 6.5 billion of us to stuff our gullets with ham sandwiches whenever we want to.” I share Hukill’s view that factory farms are an environmental, health, and moral atrocity. And I also strongly share Hukill’s skepticism about techno-hype in general, and especially the endlessly reiterated promises of painless techno-fixes as disastrously doomed to failure without education, organization, regulation to drive technodevelopment in the right directions.

But it seems to me that the conclusion one should draw from these shared views is that we should educate and organize to ensure the regulation of lab-grown cultured meat-making will in fact ameliorate the environmental, health, and moral atrocity of factory farming. For Hukill it seems that the better course is for vegetarians to make fun of meat eaters for liking to eat sandwiches with meat in them. I will admit that I cannot see any reason to agree with Hukill that this is a strategy likely to achieve the outcomes we both would claim to desire.

As of now, cultured meat involves “[t]ak[ing] some stem cells, or myoblasts, which are the precursors to muscle cells. [One s]et[s] them on [a] ‘scaffolding’ that they can attach to, like a flat sheet of plastic that the cells can later be slid off of[, and then p]ut[s] them in a ‘growth medium’ -- some kind of fluid supplying the nutrients that blood would ordinarily provide. [Then one] ‘Exercise[s]’ them regularly by administering electric currents or stretching the sheets of cells mechanically.” And then? “Wait. Harvest. Eat.”

Of this process, Hukill then says: “The concept is as simple as it is horrifying.” I have to admit, this is an utterly confounding moment in the article for me. Why exactly is the process described here “horrifying”? Is Hukill comparably horrified by the process through which one makes seitan, blue cheese, or beer? Or, not to put too fine a point on it, is Hukill not incomparably more horrified by the “process” through which animal bodies are turned into sausages and steaks?

Cultured meat-making “seems like something out of a chilling sci-fi future,” writes Hukill, “the very epitome of bloodless Matrix-style barbarism.” The proposal that cultured meat-making nudges us onto a slippery slope that will lead us ineluctably to the enslavement and slaughter of living human beings is apparently commonplace, despite its conspicuous curiosity. Consider that the cultured meat-making process doesn’t require the death or enslavement even of the nonhuman animals for whose flesh the cultured-meat would provide an alternative for corpse-eaters. Through what argumentative contortions, exactly, would one find oneself turning from the delighted contemplation of one’s cultured-meat sandwich to entertaining as a good idea that one might scoop up some fellow human beings to put them on a bun? Just how is that argument supposed to happen, again?

“[R]evulsion seems to be a common… response to the idea of meat grown in a petri dish,” writes Hukill. But is that really so? Certainly few of the people actually interviewed for the article seem to share Hukill’s knee jerk shudders of Kassoid repugnance to the very idea of cultured meat-making. And, as we shall see, neither do those who responded to the article seem to share it.

For me, as for many others, a more congenial point of view is offered up by Jason Matheny, “a doctoral student in agricultural policy at the University of Maryland who sits on the board of New Harvest, a research organization for in vitro meat.” He says of cultured meat-making, quite simply, that "[i]t's cleaner, healthier, less polluting and more humane[.]"

There’s more. “Meat grown in the sterile environment of a laboratory wouldn't harbor zoonotic diseases like avian flu or contribute to antibiotic resistance… As for human health, artery-clogging beef fat could be swapped out in vitro for salmon fat, for example, with its salubrious omega-3 fatty acids. And the squalid misery of factory farms could be bypassed altogether. No river would be fouled with manure and no chicken's beak would be clipped in the making of dinner.”

Writes “Bruce Friedrich, vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” cultured meat is "the best thing since sliced bread." As Hukill pithily summarizes Friedrich’s position, for somebody “who energetically denounces the eating of ‘animal corpses’ every chance he gets... "anything that takes the cruelty out of meat-eating is good."

This certainly sounds pretty good to me (with caveats). Again, I would insist that some of the rosy scenarios being painted here are more speculative than others. And no doubt it is only within the context of proper regulation, testing, safeguards -- not to mention trade policies to ensure that economic dislocations arising out of these developments are more properly addressed than is usually the case -- that we can speak of this (or any other) technoscientific outcome as a progressive one.

Hukill is right, then, to follow the hopeful technoscientific best-case scenario with the more cautionary note that “[t]here are a couple of serious problems with cultured meat[.]” Astonishingly, though, for me is that these “problems” for Hukill return us to the supposed “fact that people seem to find the idea repellent.”

But surely it is clear by now that only some people react this way. Can Hukill offer readers a reason to identify with the prejudices of the hostile over those of the hopeful here? Observe the very instructive exchange that immediately follows in the article: “Presented with the argument that cultured meat just ain't natural, Matheny gamely counters that wine and cheese are engineered products, too. ‘And I would say cultured meat is not inherently more unnatural than producing chicken meat from tens of thousands of animals raised intensively in their own feces and fed antibiotics,’ he says.”

Even Hukill concedes that this “is a very good point.” Hukill counters that as a vegetarian Metheny “probably” (I suspect this means that Hukill didn’t actually ask) won’t eat cultured meat, just as PETA’s vegetarian Friedrich doesn’t plan to do so. Neither do I plan to eat cultured meat, as it happens, since I have lost the taste for it in over a decade and a half of vegetarianism (I might very well indulge in cultured bacon or pepperoni, though, since these occasionally still exercise an allure for me even after all these years), but this distaste doesn’t come close to the kind of ethical aversion that might make me itch to get prohibitive laws passed.

For this ethical vegetarian, any unpleasantness that freights cultured meat, is no more ethically significant than the unpleasantness of tempeh of gorgonzola – neither of which I approve of but both of which I strongly champion as ethical alternatives to animal corpses treated as food.

But for Hukill, cultured meat-making is just “a lot of trouble to go to for a solution that is frankly nightmarish.” Especially traumatizing, apparently is “the ‘exercising’ of the disembodied muscle by means of electrical shocks.” Perhaps it would be kinder to leave these matters to Hukill’s therapist.

Certainly, this reminds us what we should do with those bioconservatives who claim there is some special "wisdom of repugnance" (whether Hukill's aversion to a stream of electricity pulsing through organic matter in a petri dish, Leonard Kass's aversion to the very idea of cloning, even if it comes to be a safe and desired procedure, Margaret Somerville's aversion to gay marriage, or any random racist's aversion to an interracial kiss). Shudders of repugnance must simply never trump democratic deliberation and contestation, the offering up of arguments to one's fellow citizens to education, agitate, and organize and so facilitate what come to be more generally desired outcomes.

“Fred Kirschenmann of Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture” introduces some reasonable skepticism, finally, and registers the hope -– which I say must be a demand rather than a “hope” –- that “there will be plenty of testing.” He goes on, "I'm not saying some of these new ideas can't be done and they won't work at some level, but every time we mess around with our ecological heritage there are always unintended side effects that come from it... We have a long history of unintended consequences.”

I could not agree with him more.

And it seems to me that reasonable concerns and reasonable regulatory environments are far more likely to arise in the context of a discussion defined neither by those given to uncritical starry-eyed techno-hype or those given in to the full-froth of technophobic panic.

Hukill proposes as an alternative to cultured meat the inculcation of greater awareness and self-discipline. It is easy to dismiss this as a more sanctimonious than serious recommendation if what is wanted is to truly ameliorate the institutionally entrenched and culturally ubiquitous slaughter and exploitation of human and nonhuman animals facilitated by the contemporary meat industry (I talk about some of the theory and politics of this ongoing catastrophe elsewhere), but the truth is that I agree with Hukill that we should work to increase awareness and organize movements with these desirable outcomes in mind. Again, though, I agree with Matheny, who Hukill quotes as “think[ing that] cultured meat can be ‘a stopgap measure’ aiding that process [of mainstreaming vegetarian practice, like] methadone for meat eaters to ease the transition out of the era of 72-ounce steaks and into the days of dollops of hummus.”

Hukill snarks in response: “Maybe he's right. Maybe in vitro meat can serve that purpose. Or maybe it will work in a different way -- by so thoroughly grossing people out that they'll gladly reduce their meat consumption just so they lessen the risk of accidentally eating a meatri burger.” Since I doubt that few people share (or will long continue to share even if they think they do so now) Hukill’s spastic “gross-out” at the very thought of cultured meat, I think Metheny is more likely to be right on his own terms. If corpse-eaters discover that their taste for flesh can be satisfied without demanding the suffering and slaughter of the sentient nonhuman humans with whom we share the planet, I suspect this realization will go a long way indeed in hastening the day when murderous meat is history and obscene factory farms are universally condemned.

Now, I must admit that I was intrigued and mostly quite pleased to discover that the comments generated in response to Hukill’s article accorded much more than I expected them to do with my own. The article has generated nearly two hundred responses so far, and so, I thought I would briefly survey just the first ten, whether I agreed with them or not, as a roughly representative sample and see whether any interesting trends suggested themselves.

Under the heading “Good idea,” the first response to the piece, by one “nbrown,” enthused: “I like it! This comes with less baggage than the existing system. If you don't believe me, go work in a slaughterhouse for a minute.”

Next up, “prod” suggests “We already have lab grown kids. Why not meat? I bet it will never be as good as the veal my girlfriend makes though. It is the best!” Since it isn’t actually true that we “already have lab grown kids,” unless “prod” refers to IVF and other assistive reproductive technologies, it is difficult to see why the ontological status of human beings would actually find its way into the discussion so quickly. But, as we shall see, the issue of “human status” is one that recurs again and again here. For me, it would be more to the point to say, “We already eat hybrid and otherwise cultivated foodstuffs. Why not meat?” The conclusion about veal -- which requires what is already widely viewed as brutal treatment of animals -- suggests to me that “prod” is being ironic here.

“JamesRollins” tells us that, “[w]hen I was eleven years old I read a book by the name of ‘Revolt in 2100’ by Robert Heinlein. In the second story of that book (named Coventry) the main protagonist talks about this same thing. And in the future, people (most of them anyway) eat lab-grown meat. As I grew up, I became a struggling vegetarian, mainly out of moral issues, and I used to think back to this book and truly wish that it was a reality. How I could truly enjoy a guilt free hamburger, only if an animal didn't die to make such a burger. I say amen! Finally, and when it becomes less costly, my family and I will fully enjoy lab-grown meat.”

Notice a pattern emerging here yet?

“BlueStateBitch” offers the slogan: “No kill; therefore no ‘yuck’” And then she elaborates: “It will be wonderful to eat "meat" without an animal having to die a painful death. Protein is protein. As long as it's healthy and tastes good, who cares if it's been grown in a lab?”

“davidhobby” wonders in his subject line whether or not Hukill has offered us a “Biased article?” He has a point. His comment: “This wasn't reportage, so much as a long screed about how awful , yucky, revolting, vile, ... lab grown meat was. That's news to me, though. I'm surprised that it seems most people have this attitude. To me, meat is meat. But then I've been a vegetarian for many years. Since I do it partially for ethical reasons, I guess that I'd eat cultured meat. It seems every culture gladly eats the ‘familiar’ meats, which may be bugs, blood or whatever, but that unfamiliar meats are considered gross. It's interesting that people don't have a big problem with unfamiliar vegetables...

There is more, but the comments are quickly becoming to elaborate to discuss in all their implications. I’m excerpted from the next, even longer, post as well. (For the full discussion, absolutely one should follow the link to the article itself and read the many interesting comments there.)

“Maybe it's just me,” writes “Lizmv,” “[b]ut human insanity seems to be a growing threat. People are getting weirder every day. Yeah, growing a little bit of ‘meat' in a laboratory may be nice and clean, but what will it look like when it is produced in huge factories? Most likely as dirty and detrimental as factory farming is now. Why is it we keep looking for expensive solutions to problems caused by the insanity of economic growth that will only continue the insanity? The real solution is already known: Learn to live sustainably. This is just another scheme by the mega-corportations to further control our food supply.”

While I think some of this skepticism is quite useful, it seems curious that “Lizmv” would rather consign this emerging development to the dustbin of history in advance dismissing it as a corporate conspiracy destined to maintain the status quo or make things worse. But why not treat this potentially destabilizing and potentially promising (not perfect, not utopian, not inevitable, just promising) development as an occasion for technoprogressives commited to democracy, sustainability, and social justice to opportunistically seize the historical forces that confront us and work to turn them to more democratizing and emancipatory ends?

There is nothing in such a vision that stands in the way of “Lizmv’s” recommendation that we “[l]earn to live sustainably.” How can she be so sure that organizing to regulate, fund, and distribute the costs and benefits of cultured meat is not one of the key demands “learn[ing] to live sustainably” makes of us in our own historical moment?

Next up, “gilliani” shares a few more interesting and reasonable concerns. The article “makes me nervous. There is a great deal we don't know about long term consequences of engineered food, veggies included. I feel it's safest to eat locally produced, organic food as much as possible.” I agree with this myself.

“gilliani” continues, “I am a vegetarian, but I also worry about the fate of all the animals we have now on farms if everyone gave up meat. We (the big we, that is) have created this method of raising animals. Those animals have lots of babies, and they're good at it. If everyone stopped eating meat, what would happen to all those animals? Will the farmers continue to feed and care for them until they die natural, peaceful deaths of old age? Maybe, but I doubt it.” It seems to me that even cultured meat will not end the meat industry overnight. I think that there would be global shifts in demand that would discourage the frantic facilitation of breeding for foodstock. A little family planning would go a long way to diminishing subsequent generations of “supply” as “demand” likewise diminished. The specter of sudden slaughter seems to me to misconstrue just how relentlessly the meat industry must actively facilitate the ongoing generation of the nonhuman animals it goes on to slaughter as food.

”gilliani” concludes: “My point is that it would take a huge cultural shift on many levels to get the carnivorous guts of North Americans off meat, and I'd rather see us make that cultural shift gradually while considering the condition of existing livestock.” I suspect myself that even with the most optimistic arrival of cultured meat-making that catastrophic violence of the meat industry will vanish from the scene of civilization far more slowly rather than too suddenly for our taste as ethical vegetarians!

“rsaxto” posts the perplexing comment that “[m]aybe we will end up eating ourselves (steaks grown from our own cells). Would it taste good or not -- only cannibals know for sure.” Again, I can see no logical or practical connection between these issues. I suspect this sort of argument arises so regularly either because it is a cynical effort of a negligible minority to make a congenial practice seem more revolting than it otherwise does to majorities, or it symptomizes the deeper irrational fears that nudge people into that negligible minority in the first place.

“I would love it,” “Samantha Vimes” posts next in conspicuous contrast. “I'm a vegetarian,” she writes, “and there's no fake salami that tastes like the real thing. These cultured meats would be meat, but they would not be part of an animal. I'd eat it. I don't even understand the ick factor. Laboratory meat doesn't have feces ground up in it, and never got a parasite infection. It seems far less icky than carcasses.”

And then, in conclusion, “deo508” ominously demands “When will we get our gr[e]en crackers?” in his subject line. “See the movie S[O]YLENT GREEN. Oh no! there feeding us people! What hell, WalMart sells baby oil made from virgin (first press) Chinese babies why not eat labratory meat?” Quite apart from the claims about WalMart (where I refuse to shop even though I am a bit skeptical about the baby oil accusation made here), it really does matter enormously to me that cultured meat-making demands the sacrifice of not one animal, as opposed to the scenario in Soylent Green in which bulldozers cheerfully scoop up crowds of living humans from urban streets, murder them, and then feed them to the remaining population. Failing to grasp this as a difference that makes a difference is, to say the least, puzzling.

Now, I think it is quite clear where I stand on the specific questions raised by Hukill’s argument, but what I find especially heartening is that the mainstream progressive audience of AlterNet seems to be responding much the same way. The conspicuous irrationality and hysteria of the exemplars of the bioconservative left in evidence among the respondents is heartening in its way, too, in its extremity and marginality.

I have been repeatedly making an argument here lately that there is an emerging technoprogressive mainstream in the American and in the global left. The emerging technoprogressive mainstream is a technoscientifically literate left that is coming to understand the affinities between the use and defense of digital networks and peer-to-peer democracy, the defense of consensus science, the need for well-regulated and radically increased medical research and development, and the demand for an immediate shift from primitive extractive petrochemical and military industries to renewable technologies.

This is a new left, a genuinely emancipatory left. This is a left that has no patience with the technophobic luddism of Deep Ecology, but neither has it any truck with the complacent corporate-militarism of the DLC. The technoprogressive left is not seduced by the nostalgia of anti-democratic elites that gets peddled in the name of “nature,” “natural markets,” or “nature’s God.”

And in consequence, I think it is less and less relevant all the time for technoprogressives to decry as their chief antagonists “left luddites,” when clearly it is “bioconservatives” of the religious and social right and “corporate futurists” of the neoliberal, neoconservative, and market fundamentalist right who are our more conspicuous antagonists. Although there are vestigial pockets of technophobia and naturalist nostalgia on the left, it seems to me that there is little remaining energy to be discerned there, and that technoprogressives would do better to educate and outreach to the reasonable among those folks and otherwise let them drift out of the picture.

Crossposted from Amor Mundi

Language and Communication

Oriental languages are doomed.

This is one conclusion I’ve come to after reading The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

As the world gets smaller — with shorter, faster connections between people and places — and flatter — with horizontal relationships between people and organizations replacing vertical models — the need for effective communication becomes increasingly important.

Effective communication must be both simple and complex. The ability to express complex ideas, to use nuance and subtle shadings that are well understood, is of great value. Many languages can do this (although English may be the most adept, due to its liberal borrowing of words and phrases from other languages).

But the other key factor is simplicity of representation. This is where English writing excels, and where the Oriental languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) show their fatal flaw.

Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters, of which about 4,000 are in common use…[i]

[W]hereas Western letters can be represented on computer screens by as few as 35 dots of light, Japanese characters can require up to 576 dots to be clearly distinguishable.[ii]

It was digits — zeroes and ones — that drove the Information Revolution. When a system developed to express and process highly complex algorithms in a profoundly simple way, basically a long string of yes/no choices, the world changed.

Similarly, Western writing — especially English — allows for relatively simple representation of complex expressions.

English has additional advantages, such as its simplicity of inflected forms — “in Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections; in English, it never has more than five and often gets by with just three”[iii] — near total absence of gender cases, and elimination of diacritical marks (umlauts, cedillas, circumflexes, and so on) that complicate other languages.

American English has become the dominant language in the online world, and not only because American culture is so pervasive. It’s a two-way street. American culture can be pervasive because the language it uses is so good at effective communication; it possesses the killer combination of complex expression and simple representation.

Shrinking and flattening will continue. Effective communication between diverse groups will matter more and more. And ideas — scientific, technical, commercial, political, and cultural ideas — will shape the future.

Today, perhaps 3,000 languages are in significant use (by 10,000 or more speakers), although this number is rapidly declining. It’s estimated that as few as 10% of these will remain by the end of this century. Looking further ahead, it’s not hard to imagine only a handful of languages persisting.

Given the factors I’ve listed above, it’s probably a safe bet to say that some version of English will become humanity’s common language, and that the ancient and beautiful Oriental scripts will become antiquated.

---

[i] Bryson, Bill (1990) The Mother Tongue, p. 108

[ii] Ibid, p. 111

[iii] Ibid, p. 125

Deliberative Development and Bifocal Perspectives

A demand for more deliberative development is exactly as central to my own version of technoprogressive politics as is the demand for sustainable development.

That phrase, "deliberative development," may conjure up the facile and fussy image of "progress" by plan or by committee meeting, a vision of a domesticated development smoothed, controlled, and constrained by experts. But the fact is that technodevelopmental social struggle releases inherently unpredictable forces into the world. It is ineradicably dynamic, interminably contentious, ideally open... So just what do I mean by deliberative development after all?

For one thing, deliberative development would indeed involve highly transparent, generously funded processes of consensus science coupled with a scientifically literate professional policy apparatus to assess risks, costs, and benefits and advise our elected representatives as they struggle to do their job to regulate, study, and fund research and development to promote general welfare. In practice, this would inevitably amount to proliferating committee meetings and inspection tours and licensing standards and granting bodies and blue-ribbon panels and published conference proceedings and impact studies and public hearings and all the rest. I happen to like nice social workers and dedicated public servants and credentialized do-gooders as a type, and I pine for a civilization in which their indispensable work is generally more appreciated than demeaned, and so this is not a vision that inspires in me the dread and disgust that will have overcome many a (self-described) "rugged" "no-nonsense" critic at this point in my account.

But I do want to insist that, even for me, the real force of any such ramifying procedural elaboration must be the deeper democratization rather than any quixotic domestication of technodevelopmental social struggle. The object will be to anticipate and document technodevelopmental outcomes in their variety on the multiple, contending stakeholders to that development, and hence to give those stakeholders a voice in articulating the form developments take from moment to moment, to better ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscience are as fairly shared as may be by all of those stakeholders on their own terms.

Given the devastating debasement of consensus science and the corrupt substitution of lobbying for deliberation under the present Bush Administration, I hope that my focus on deliberative development as a commitment to transparent processes and sound standards makes a certain kind of sense. But it is crucial to point out that the ideal of deliberative development is also a commitment to enrich and democratize the terrain of policy analysis as much as possible across its many social, institutional, and cultural layers. It is in highlighting this second dimension that I hope it becomes clearer that deliberative development is not a matter of constraining but democratically expressing technodevelopmental social struggle, not a matter of domesticating but democratizing the forces of collaborative and individual creativity.

The ongoing, experimental implementation of this dimension of deliberative development might well involve the use of digital networked media to engage citizens more directly in the assessment of alternate science and technology initiatives, perhaps to use social software to re-invigorate the concept of citizen juries on developmental questions, to create extensive occasions for citizens to testify to their own sense of technodevelopmental costs, risks, benfits, and problems, and, perhaps most promising of all, to implement peer-to-peer models of research over customary corporate-militarist models wherever possible.

Such a commitment also demands, in my view,

[1] the promotion of scientific literacy and critical thinking skills for all citizens through a stakeholder grant in lifelong education and training,
[2] universal access to networked information and communication technologies,
[3] a liberalization of "fair use" entitlements and other measures to protect and widen access to the common archive of human knowledge, as well as
[4] ensuring the availability of clear and dependable sources of information from consensus science and the most representative possible diversity of stakeholder positions on policy questions at issue.

This commitment to dependable information might also very well require more stringent regulation of advertising claims to limit fraud as well as explicit legal standards to define just what can go by the name of "news." Eventually, the commitment might also provide a rationale for the public subsidization of some consensual genetic, prosthetic, neuroceutical modifications of memory, concentration, or temper.

In general, I think that what are sometimes broadly conceived as "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to good governance are in fact both indispensable to the facilitation of progressive and technoprogressive developmental outcomes. I have noticed that this kind of bifocal perspective on developmental politics comes up again and again in my own technoprogressive formulations. And so, for example, I advocate democratic world federalism and peer-to-peer collaborative democratization at once and as part of a single technoprogressive vision of global governance. I realize that each lens of such a bifocal approach has its own palpable dangers and terrors to display. Some progressives are wary of threats to social justice and democracy from especially one direction, others from another.

But I think we should be careful not to fetishize only one mode of governance as the more properly or more essentially democratic one over the other. A fetishization of "top-down" implementations of progressive visions facilitated their perversion in state-capitalist models all through the twentieth century, for example, while the current overcompensatory fetishization of "bottom-up" implementations renders the contemporary left imaginary -- and especially any technology-focused left in an era like our own, when corporate profit-making almost exhaustively defines the global technodevelopmental terrain -- deeply vulnerable in my view to appropriation by libertarian ideology and its always ultimately conservative, facile self-congratulatory fables of "spontaneous order."

And so, yes, I really do think that deference to the advice of credentialed experts is indispensable to good governance and certainly to technoprogressive governance. The problem these days isn't the administrative recourse to scientific and professional expertise; it is the substitution of public relations and partisan calculus for the recommendations of consensus scientists and other professionals.

Certainly, I keenly grasp the vulnerability to anti-democratic elitism in any "rule of experts." But many things count as democratic within their proper bounds that are vulnerable nonetheless to misuses that render them anti-democratic at their extremes (what passes for "free markets" provides an obvious example). I was recently reminded that Bakunin made a useful distinction between being an authority and being in authority that seems relevant here.

I think it is important for progressive and technoprogressive people to embrace a wide-ranging experimentalism and pluralism when it comes to the practical implementation of the rather broad value of democracy. So long as experts are beholden to elected representatives and elected representatives held accountable for their conduct (including the uses to which they put expert advice) I don't think we should think of their role as anti-democratic, nor should we necessarily be too quick to write them off as just regrettable but instrumentally necessary for the proper function of governance. I worry about the politics that gets stealthed under cover of presumably pre-political "instrumental calculation" in political discourse. I say, rather, that there are more-democratic and less-democratic implementations of a representative policy apparatus beholden to the verdicts of consensus science and that democratic technoprogressives want more democratic rather than less democratic implementations is all. I was going to say, "it isn't rocket science," but then at least sometimes, of course, it will be.

Crossposted from Amor Mundi.

Science Reporting: Another Well-Aimed Rant

This Wired commentary by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is so good that I have to quote heavily from it:

At theaters across the US this summer, Americans will learn the truth about global warming from the man who almost became their president. An Inconvenient Truth is the film adaptation of a slide show that Al Gore has presented thousands of times to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. You -- and your 10,000 best friends -- should see this movie. . .

About halfway through, Gore cites two studies to explain why so many people remain so skeptical about global warming. The first looked at a random sample of almost 1,000 abstracts on climate change in peer-reviewed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003 and found that exactly zero doubted “that we’re causing global warming.” The second surveyed a random sample of more than 600 articles about global warming in popular media between 1988 and 2002 and discovered that 53 percent questioned “that we’re causing global warming.”

Good journalism likes two sides to every story. Lazy journalism fails to distinguish between objective sources and interested parties – and this issue has interested parties aplenty, from ­industry-funded think tanks to hired PR firms, feeding the press the disinformation it needs to make the story sound balanced. This is the media’s own inconvenient truth – that the institution charged with reporting the facts is so easily manipulated. . .

Gore wants to change how we act by changing how we think about global warming. Yet An Inconvenient Truth can inspire progress only if the audience is responsive. Of course, the audience best prepared to fix global warming – the government – has already been corrupted by the same money that plays the puppet press so well. Likewise with the media’s inconvenient truth: If any of the networks were so impertinent as to report what scientists know about global warming, could it withstand the inevitably well-orchestrated charge of bias? These truths may be inconvenient, but the forces resisting their acceptance are extraordinarily powerful.

The issue for technoprogressives should be obvious: unless people (especially those who make and influence crucial decisions) are able to receive accurate information about important matters, they can't make good choices.

One of the problems with a free press is that it is susceptible to being bought. Of course, freedom of the press certainly is preferable to having a controlled press, even if the controlling party is supposedly benign, but maintaining the value of a free press requires constant vigilance.

During the last 20 years or so, America's independent media has been largely gobbled up by corporate monoliths. If not for the rise of the netroots and the blogosphere, there might be no voice left to oppose the megacorp-neocon "truth" machine.

The Hellish Reality of War

War is the single most uncivilized, immoral, inhuman activity in which humans participate. It is the measure of our immaturity as a species and our unfitness as designers of societies.

Sometimes, sadly, nations and peoples are compelled to take up arms and defend themselves. We can hope (and we must believe) that a time will come when we are able to renounce war and fight no more forever. But that time is not yet.

Still, the recognition that war at times may be necessary must not dull our realization that war is quite clearly the worst condition that man can create on earth.

When wars are fought, men go insane. They do the unthinkable. In wartime, atrocities occur. They always do, they always have, and they always will. War is hell.

Knowing this, we should not be surprised to discover that last year in the town of Haditha, U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children. We should not be surprised if more such horrors are discovered. We should not have been surprised when atrocities were committed in My Lai, and other places, during the Vietnam War. Even during "good wars" like WWII, horrible things took place -- acts of treachery, violence, and barbarism that otherwise normal humans never would have committed under peaceful circumstances. (Although these terrible behaviors are to be expected in wartime, their individual occurrences can never be excused, of course.)

So, what is the lesson here? It is that war must always be the very last resort. It must be entertained only when all other means of resolving a dispute have been exhausted, and when the only remaining choice is to fight or to perish. It must be avoided at nearly all costs.

Because once the choice is made and war is waged, all hell will break loose. Killing, maiming, plundering, raping, torturing: this, tragically, is the stuff of war.

When the leaders of a nation ask their citizens to support them in going to war, the people should demand the highest possible burden of proof as to its unavoidable and absolute necessity. Hell is a stiff price to pay for any less.

Playing Gods

Minette Marrin has an interesting commentary at the Times Online this week about the new embryo screening technique that's been recently approved in the UK. It applauds the use of the technique, pre-implantation genetic haplotyping, which will allow the detection of "nearly 6000 diseases and conditions."

The technology itself aside, there are some pretty serious problems with this particular article.

Marrin starts out by saying that "Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy."

Embracing new technologies with very little critical examination is as bad as rejecting them out of hand. I worry that Marrin commits the former sin, and here's why: in arguing for an all-out embrace of this genetic screening, she says-

This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But what on earth is wrong with humans playing God? I am all for it, especially as God doesn’t seem to be doing it. Besides, whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it already and even though we don’t necessarily recognise it, we approve of it.

For instance, there are many people who in the course of nature would die before they were old enough to have children. They might suffer from inherited heart defects or blood disorders that would kill them if they did not get transplants or dialysis. They might have disabilities that would kill them as newborn babies, without intervention. If properly treated these people may well live to be able to have children and some of those children will be at risk of inheriting the same problems and, in their turn, may pass them down the generations.

Eugenicists might think, and used to say publicly, that this is bad for the gene pool. Yet hardly anybody, I imagine, believes that such people should be denied treatment.

Of course no one would argue that such people should be denied treatment. But comparing routine medical treatment with potential eugenics arguments seems... bizarre to me, at best. This new screening technology certainly opens up a place for the eugenics discussion once again, but it hardly seems that bringing adults receiving now-routine medical treatment into the argument, even for the sake of analogy, is a good idea. She's implying that since we are keeping more people alive with what she considers disabilities, we are already in the playing-god business. So, the logic appears to go, shouldn't we play god with those people's children, as well, since they bring a potentially larger risk into the gene pool? I really don't think the author intended to bring eugenics into the discussion by making eugenics arguments.

But the author's arguments get even more ill-advised:

Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said last week that she was opposed in principle to such screening on the grounds that it sent the signal that being born disabled was a bad thing. The mind reels. Over the years I have got used to the disability lobby talking in this spirit, so it no longer seems as absurd as once it did, but surely it must be obvious that it would be far better for a person not to have a disability than to have one.

[...]

To say that a disability is undesirable in itself is not to say that a person with that disability is undesirable in herself, or her life worth less than someone else’s. The disability is not the person. It is to say that her life would be better without that disability.

This is where I start to take (further) issue. "It must be obvious that it would be far better for a person not to have a disability than to have one." Not only do I not find it obvious, but I immediately want to know what qualifies as a disability. I realize there are some very obvious illnesses in which a child has a short, painful life full of suffering. The 6000 conditions that this test screens for are surely not all of that type. Who decides that X is a disability and Y isn't? As Anita Silvers has pointed out, things considered disabilities can be advantages in some situations (if someone in a wheelchair decides to race me on the street tomorrow, I'm going to lose!) I think we should add to that the fact that evolution itself works via random mutation, and we have no idea what will be beneficial in the future. I happen to agree (contra this author) that it is wrong to send the signal that being born disabled is a bad thing. It assumes that every difference is an automatic downgrade. I'm reminded of the child born in China recently with a fully functional third arm - which was removed purely because it was abnormal, and not because it was painful, or harmful, or promised a life of suffering to the child. (In fact, I would argue a third arm would provide a pretty serious advantage, speaking especially as a violin player!)

The author says that the life of someone with a disability would be better without the disability, and that such a claim passes no judgment on the individual whatsoever. Without being accused of being PC (which is absolutely not what this is about) I heartily disagree - the author is absolutely claiming that the individual is worth less because of the disability. If the life is not as good as it could be, our lives, the lives of "normal individuals," are better - we are better off. We lead better lives by this argument. How can the author claim that this is not passing a judgment on the individual?

What's even more interesting to me are the comments that follow the article. Many of them raise worthwhile points, too lengthy to examine here. But Jabir, from Singapore asks: "Also, if a couple cannot produce an embryo that passes the screening test without any diseases, should they be deprived of having children?" Of all of the problems this technology creates, this comment is the best illustration of two: the problem of individual choice and the lack of public understanding surrounding new technologies. While both of these are blog entries unto themselves, these things are all bound up together inescapably. No one is (or should be) demanding that every couple use this technology. Perhaps that would be truly playing god, and that's one more god I could do without.

Cross posted to hyper-textual ontology

Gobal Family Picnic

Everybody eats, nobody hits and there is no third rule.

-- Rev. Billy Hults

When I first read this aphorism, I thought it was supposed to be an angry parent coming down on the unruly kids at a family picnic. (Maybe that reflects my own experience of growing up.)

Then I realized that it also works nicely as a summation of my ideal political worldview.

"Everybody eats..."

We know there is plenty of food -- and clothing, and shelter, and medicine -- to go around for everyone. It's not that we have more people on the planet than we can support (although, if population growth rates were not declining, we could be headed for trouble), it's that we lack the humanist consensus and political will to make sure everyone has enough.

"Nobody hits..."

Disagreements will occur, we know that, but they must be settled through means other than force. This should include a prohibition on other forms of coercion too, except those necessary to implement the first directive.

"There is no third rule."

The point of this is that everyone is free to do and believe as they choose, assuming the first two rules are followed. It's in the spirit of the Libertarian approach -- the part I like -- which is that individuals and groups should have the liberty to do as they please, as long as they do not harm others or trample on their rights.

So, this nice little one-sentence dictum incorporates global liberalism (ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met), conservative strength (using might to protect freedom), and hippie individualism ("whatever turns you on, man" or "different strokes for different folks").

Got it? Everyone agree? Good, then let's enjoy the fried chicken.

Robbie vs. Predator

Asimov's Robot Stories famously center on his self-admittedly flawed 3 Laws of Robotics

(roughly:
1. Don't hurt humans.
2. Obey humans but don't violate (1).
3. Keep yourself safe but don't violate (1 & 2). )

and how various subtle loopholes in the laws can lead to all kinds of trouble--sort of like happens with insufficiently robust code all the time nowadays.

Anyway, I've been noticing a trend that violates his laws in a blatantly unsubtle way: the current enthusiasm at the Pentagon and in the pop-sci press for robot warriors. Bombing or machine gunning civilians is a pretty horrendously awful violation of Law 1--unless you're so right-wing that you don't think that terrorists (or innocent Muslim civilians) count as humans for purposes of the law. Much of the press adulation centers on pilotless Predator drone aircraft, which strike me as not robots in the precisely autonomous implications of that word, since they're remote-controlled from U.S. Central Command in South Florida. An actually autonomous robot doing such things--besides the fact that the current Wars on Scary Nouns (drugs, "terrah") are giant war crimes anyway--would have as an additional horror the possibility of autonomous robots deciding that they weren't particularly interested in not following the advice of Futurama's cigar-smoking robot Bender to "Kill all Humans!" While this is a goofy science-fiction cliché, I'm still not eager to see the Pentagon make it the goofily clichéd yet entirely actual death of Humanity.

While I share with most Earthlings an abhorrence for the War on Terra--with or without killer robots--I'm not such a pacifist as to believe in the impossibility of a (more or less) just war (St. Augustine, WWII and all that) as such, so assuming a non-rogue state (i.e. we're obviously talking about, say, Canada or Sweden here, not the American Empire) was involved in, say, a humanitarian intervention to stem the genocide in the Sudan, a legitimate argument could be made for using what animé calls mecha to keep what animé calls orga out of harm's way. I'd be okay with this, provided the mecha remain remote-controlled by us orga, rather than autonomous. That said, though, I think that most of the proximately probably wars (i.e. the ones involving nation-building) do better with boots on the ground that can learn to become trusted neighborhood cops, not with a bunch of criminal Shock n' Awe--or whatever stupid macho metal band name they come up with next--carpet bombings by bots in the sky remote-controlled by some well-meaning 19-yr.-old kid in South Florida unintentially replicating the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene in Apocalypse Now via satellite uplink.

I can think of one GREAT use for autonomous robots in war zones, though. Robots programmed with something like Asimov's First Law ("Thou Shalt Not Kill," might be couched in a vocabulary W. has heard before) would be good at searching villages for enemy soldiers without the possibility for "human errors" like My Lai and Haditha.

(Frivolous terminological note: Since we're on the topic of 1950's sci-fi tropes here, I've often thought it would be a good throw-away premise if future historians in a sci-fi tale referred to our American Empire as the Western British Empire, analagous to referring to the Byzantines as the Eastern Roman Empire. While the differences between the current hegemon and that presided over by Disraeli's Empress of India are myriad, they might seem like subtle esoterica best left to microspecialists compared to the market-fundamentalist Anglospheric commonalities that will loom so large in the eyes of people a millenium hence.)

The Other Drug Legalization

The other day I needed to refill a prescription on which I had no refills left. Since I'm uninsured, this involved going to a local medical clinic franchise and paying $100 to obtain a piece of paper from a doctor authorizing me to take something I knew very well I needed with no $100 consultation from him, thank you very much. As it was, I felt ridiculous, an adult grovelling for magic paper like a high schooler trying to beg, borrow, or steal a precious hall pass.

It got me thinking about what I might call the Other Drug Legalization, the absence of which I had previously taken for granted. Why, exactly, do we have prescriptions at all? The best answers I can come up with are that it:
--prevents antibiotic overuse
--buttresses the idiotic War on Drugs by limiting the potential for homebrewing
--makes sure people don't kill themselves with drug interactions
--makes easy money for doctors

Two of these (preventing antibiotic overuse and fatal drug interactions) are great. And my gripe about the cost aspect of my visit to the clinic could be cured by the simple, common-sense expedient of universal health insurance. But I'd want to see more drugs available over the counter, even if we all got health insurance tomorrow and antibiotics remain safely rationed behind the counter to prevent overuse.

Why? Because people ought to be able to decide for themselves what they want to put into their bodies. (I might say they have a "right" to do so, but that's another discussion!) Making more drugs available over the counter helps eliminate the medical community's ability to enforce the pernicious distinction between therapy and enhancement. If, for instance, people want to take an anti-depressant to feel better than well rather than just baseline, they shouldn't need to lie to an anti-enhancement doctor to get a prescription for it.

There is at least one problem I can foresee, however, (I assume commenters will foresee others!) if such liberalization is introduced while the U.S. is still in thrall to its heartless and wasteful for-profit health insurance system: people who can't afford a doctor are going to self-prescribe even if they need someone's help to sort out drug interactions, and they're going to end up dead--for reasons that have nothing to do with liberty, and everything to do with poverty.

Ah, well. I guess it'll have to wait until universal healthcare....

Guaranteeing Universal Human Rights

Faith and reason...rights and governance...religion and science...

The contributors to this blog are tackling all sorts of incendiary issues, some that may be considered beyond the bounds of typical or acceptable discourse. So be it.

More importantly, even the nascent stages of this blog (see "The Science of Right and Wrong" and "A Left without Rights?" and the appended comments) have illuminated the interconnectedness of apparently unrelated subjects like faith and technology, and this is all to the good.


In 1968, the Russian physicist, atheist, and moralist Andrei Sakharov wrote:

International affairs must be completely permeated with scientific methodology and a democratic spirit, with a fearless weighing of all facts, views, and theories, with maximum publicity of ultimate and intermediate goals, and with a consistency of principles.

Two and a half decades later, in a commentary on Sakharov's work, Ernest Partridge said:

"Scientific morality" is widely regarded as an oxymoron, since it is commonly believed that science is "value neutral." This belief embraces a pernicious half-truth. The logic of science stipulates that the data, laws, hypotheses and theories of science exclude evaluative terms and concepts, and that the vocabulary of science be exclusively empirical and formal. There are no "oughts," no "goods and bads," no "rights and wrongs." (The fact that social sciences deal with values descriptively, is only an apparent violation of this rule). Capitalist and communist missiles are subject to the same laws of trajectory. The same laws of physiology apply to the physician who heals, and the murderer who poisons. The "value-free" status of scientific vocabulary and assertion is the "truthful half" of the belief that science is "value free."

But as an activity, science is steeped in evaluation, for the "value-free" methodology that yields these "value-free" statements, requires a discipline and a commitment that appears to merit the name of "morality." Thus the advancement of science is characterized by behavior that can only be described as "virtuous," and the corruption of science as moral weakness. In other words, the activity of science (that is to say, of science as a human institution) is highly involved with values. . .

Science and scholarship are engaged in a constant struggle to replace persuasion with demonstration -- the distinction is crucial to understanding the discipline and morality of science.

I will extend Partridge's position to say that "value-free" science not only must be conducted under the constraints of virtuous morality, but that scientific methodology -- that is, study, reason, observation, hypothesis, testing, etc. -- can be used to determine a functional prescriptive societal macroethics. (In this context, I encourage the reading of Brad Allenby's fine three-part series of columns on "Free Will and the Anthropogenic Earth".)

Here's a very simple formulation to start with:

1. Let's declare that all groups, communities, and societies are free to think and believe what they want, but not to behave as they like. Belief is free, behavior has consequences.
   
   
2. Let's accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, as a global standard.
   
   
3. Let's agree that if we find any group in any society taking stated rights away from weaker groups or individuals within that society, then the world must act to stop the abuse and to prevent its recurrence.

I propose that if the preceding formulation was followed, more humans would enjoy broader rights, and society as a whole would be measurably improved.

Take that as an hypothesis and evaluate it. What can we learn about the potential efficacy of this approach in achieving greater diffusion and enjoyment of the stated rights?

A Left without Rights?

Thinking aloud here: I may not even agree with this when I reread it tomorrow.

Much of our modern talk about why the world needs to be changed is grounded in the language of rights--Human Rights, Great Ape Rights, Animal Rights, and so forth. The language of rights, in turn, has historically been grounded in conceptions about either Nature or Nature's God. This presents a problem for technoprogressive discourse: Technoprogressive types tend to believe passionately in acting for the amelioration of suffering and the improvement of the state of the world, but also tend to argue that conceptions rooted in valorizations of "the natural" are best discarded for more postnaturalistic ways of thinking. Thus, technoprogressives are among those talking and thinking about problems that most of the world talks and thinks about in terms of "rights," a concept whose naturalism makes it uncongenial at best.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence is perhaps the best text (likely the most frequently employed, at any rate) with which to illustrate some of the derivations of modern rights talk. The introduction speaks of the American people assuming

"the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

This phrase is far less famous than the preamble's:

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

In both cases, the rights asserted are grounded in appeals to nature and divinity. The former appeal characterizes attempts to reduce ethics to science, the latter, to reduce it to religion. The Declaration typifies the Deist era--containing glimmers of both medieval theology's twilight and modern scientism's dawn. The text reflects its author: Jefferson famously collated his own New Testament with all the supernaturalism (literally) cut out, and dabbled in the pseudoscientific and scientistic vogue for attempting to reduce the passions to equations like Love + Hate = Jealousy. But it was Franklin, revolutionary, scientist, and one-time muser about something akin to cryonics (involving pickling in port), who pushed Jefferson to replace "sacred" with "self-evident".

The moment when Jefferson's quill scratched out "sacred" for "self-evident" nicely marks the emergence of modern rights talk. Beforehand, Westerners were mostly talking about a Natural Law grounded in Scholastic exegeses of Aristotle and the Bible. The Scholastic tradition that rights descend from Nature's God was an inheritance from the Stoics that the Latin West had picked up from Cicero.

The problems for technoprogressivism of rights grounded in anybody's Flying Spaghetti Monster probably seem pretty "self-evident" to most who'd read this, and I'm not going to belabor them here (anymore than I already have...). But grounding rights in nature just reproduces these problems in a stealthed form--which stealthing is of course awfully characteristic of the last few centuries in a Foucauldian sorta way.

One problem with appeals to nature: The self-evident ain't.

Self-evidence was another Stoic shibboleth, the epistemological gladius with which they fended off the probabilistic Carneadean skeptics of the New Academy and fought their way to an empiricism that they found adequate to ground their ethical assertions. When Franklin replaced sacredness with self-evidence, he was grounding the Declaration in the same sort of presumed common sense. But consensus beliefs that the sun rises in the morning (or that the Earth revolves around it) have to remain, however commonsensical, only provisional if the scientific method is to be true to itself. And in the domain of ethics, scientific study of nature can't even supply such strong probabilities. People don't agree about ethics the way they do about the sun. So appeals to nature tend to just reproduce appeals to God in more secularly respectable language, from the Stoic dictum to "Live according to nature," to the modern homophobe's contention that gay marriage "just ain't natural."

But if technoprogressives can't ground rights in these appeals, can we, should we, still argue from them? Rights can simply be asserted, without attempting to ground the assertion in anything. Or rights can be grounded merely in the fact that lots of people already believe in them. Or rights can be grounded in a sense that we wouldn't want to live in a world without them.

But none of these is immune to even half-serious argumentative attack. So I'm led to ask if the technoprogressive left can find a way to argue without rights, or a different way to talk about rights. Policies can be argued for on utilitarian grounds--regardless of whether people are entitled to X, it would be swell if they had it. Or, rights can be conceptualized as a shared and currently indispensable cultural norm around which political talk coalesces at the interpersonal, local, national, and global levels, but which can be endlessly reshaped by discussion about what the good life and the good society ought to be. In this case, rights, like selves, might be conceived as a kind of narratively necessary fiction, a motif with which to tell each other politically powerful stories about justice.

This is the sort of understanding of technoprogressive rights talk that I'm inching toward. The problem with it is, something like "a woman's right to choose" loses much of its rhetorical strength with a denatured rights talk. So what to do?

The Escape Hatch

Stephen Hawking recently gave a speech in which he advocated the near-future colonization of space to ensure the survival of humanity in the face of looming disasters such as global warming, nuclear war, and genetically engineered disease. His comments have drawn scathing criticism across the blogosphere, most notably among the contributors on ScienceBlogs. These critics deride Hawking's suggestion primarily on three counts: we are nowhere near the level of technology sufficient to survive off Earth indefinitely; only a small elite could possibly escape one of these disasters, should one arise; and we should clean up our mess on Earth before we think of spreading it elsewhere.

Hawking's specific urging of space colonization in the next few decades is quite possibly technologically impossible. The question is: what role, if any, should space exploration and settlement play in a technoprogressive society?

It seems clear that the basic premise from which Hawking starts is correct. We could easily exterminate ourselves in a variety of ways, or nature could handily do the job for us. If there is a reasonable prospect for success, certainly having some humans alive is better than none, and the only way to ensure this survival is to get some humans off Earth. The more, the farther away, the better. Unfortunately, until we can create self-sustaining artificial biospheres, any off-Earth settlement is doomed.

But that doesn't mean that we should ignore these prospects. Earth's ecosystem is being damaged by human activity on Earth, particularly through global warming. If we haven't reached it yet, we are soon approaching the point at which merely halting our activities is no longer enough. We will have to actively manage at least some of our environment if we are to recover what we are losing. We will find ourselves re-terraforming Terra itself. Where will we learn? Our track record thus far is fairly abysmal.

I submit that space settlement -- both in self-contained orbital habitats and on the surface of Mars and other bodies -- and the restoration of Earth's ecosystem are projects best achieved symbiotically with one another. Lessons learned as we examine the damage we have wreaked here will find applications as we strive to build better environments elsewhere. And as we learn about building environments from the ground up, we will learn what can be done to return from damage that might otherwise be irreversible. As both projects proceed, we will eventually reach a point at which we have recovered from our terrestrial foibles and spread pockets of survival away from the dangers that threaten us.

There is another, more indirectly progressive reason to encourage the settlement of space: diversity. Until such time as the world has been rid of totalitarianism, there will always be forces of homogeneity and oppression. Societies independent of Earth entirely, separated from Earthly concerns by millions of miles, will be free to establish myriad experiments in liberal and social democracy. Some will be anarchies, some will be communes, others will be republics, and so on. Cultures will diverge, new art and music and food will be created. The human experience will be richer for the diaspora.

But this is something that cannot flourish until centuries hence. Progressivism is pragmatic, interested in finding solutions to problems that achieve the best outcomes for the most people. I suggest that a technoprogressive space exploration program would be focused in the near-term on planetology, learning about the similarities and differences between Earth and its neighbors with continuing space-based Earth observation and environmental research.

However, human spaceflight is a capacity that we cannot afford to ignore, despite the risks. But rather than a flags-and-footprints program of nationalistic pride -- another Apollo, or President Bush's current Moon-Mars masturbation -- human spaceflight should be about something. It should be about science and exploration and survival, furthering the goals outlined above as they become feasible. It is not a choice between a crumbling Earth and the fantasy of space. We should not shy away from grand dreams, but harness them for the good of all.

The Science of Right and Wrong

How do we find answers to important questions? In the beginning, humans looked to wise elders, sages, and shamans. Over time, authority to speak on matters of consequence became vested in secular rulers, religious leaders -- or, frequently, a hybrid of the two.

It wasn’t until the 17th century that an objective approach to finding true answers was outlined by Bacon and Descartes (and later refined by Charles Sanders Peirce). We call it the scientific method. Through this means, we learned that our planet orbits the sun, that disease is transmitted by microbes, and that old women do not fly on broomsticks.

Can we now use the same method for discovering answers to significant ethical questions? Could right and wrong be determined through study and reason?

Those who wrote the books that some call scripture were, perforce, not well-informed about the way the world works. They did their best to make sense of what they saw, but their understanding was severely limited both by a lack of information and by a means of acquiring reliable data. This may help explain why adultery, homosexuality, and even cursing were considered punishable by death.

If we wouldn't want to rely on ancient sages to give us good directions for crossing the ocean, for preventing infections, or for treating mental illness, then why do we assume that their definitions of right and wrong (and appropriate consequences for violating societal norms) cannot be improved upon?

This is more than just an interesting epistemological issue. Many of us still seem oddly reluctant to surrender our reliance on mystical (some might say ignorant) authorities for instruction on moral issues. But emerging technologies -- especially molecular manufacturing -- could enable fanatical believers in ancient superstitions to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. Do we want someone who relies upon the “truth” of books written by “prophets” to execute their visions of justice upon millions of our fellow humans?

Before we reach a point of total democratization of violence -- a day that is rapidly approaching -- we should take a serious look at how we determine right and wrong. It may be time to seek global consensus on the necessity of relying upon reason instead of faith to answer life’s most critical questions. Our survival may depend upon it.

Originally posted at Science Blog, May 21, 2006

What or Who is All?

On this Technoprogressive blog, our motto is “Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All.”

Nice words, and I support the concepts wholeheartedly. But I want to examine the meaning of the last word: ‘All’. What or who is all?

I propose that the word all should be understood in this context to mean two different things: first, a lower-case all, referring to a set that contains every individual member of a group; and second, an upper-case All, meaning the group as a collective entity. A proper understanding of human society includes the concept that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Obvious? Perhaps, to most of us. But not to everyone.

In a private online forum that I moderate, a member recently asserted that “involuntary wealth transfers, unless done to enforce reparation to the recipient for real damages done to them by the payer, are unethical and harmful/destructive to the payer.”

Fortunately, this libertarian dogma regarding taxation is far from universally accepted, even in the conservative United States, but especially in Europe and the rest of the world.

Taxation, in my view, is not a ‘necessary evil’ and should not be regarded as an accommodation we grudgingly make. On the contrary, taxation is a positive. When applied wisely, wealth redistribution results in positive-sum gains. This works at every level, from family to municipality to region to nation (and, someday, the whole world). It is a means of establishing and building community; indeed, it is the basis of any healthy, interdependent, civilized society.

The argument from the Right is that individuals form the basis of society and that the individual person is the proper building block from which to begin creating any model of human organization. But this position assumes that individuals came first and community later. It’s a flawed concept, one that is derived, apparently, from primitive Judeo-Christian writings. More than just errant, it’s a dangerous idea, because it works to oppose community and to retard social progress.

The truth is that human social organization is a natural occurrence, an intrinsic quality. It is not something that ever was imposed on us from outside. To take the individual human as a starting point for building a world-view or a political ideology is a mistake. Any healthy society starts with community. Families, small groups, and neighborhoods: these are the real building blocks. Our focus should be on how these communities can work together most successfully.

Democratic Phlebotomy

There's a great article by Art Caplan over at Bioethics.net, originally on MSNBC about the current shortage of blood in US bloodbanks.

I'm one of those people who feels obligated (and more than happy) to donate blood every eight weeks. There's simply no good reason not to do it. It saves lives, you aren't losing anything (hey, you get some cookies out of the deal), and it only takes about thirty minutes of your time. I've been in 4 times this month and unable to donate because my iron level has been too low (barely - 12.3 when it needs to be a minimum of 12.5). But I keep going back, and I keep trying. The bloodbank called me 5 times last week (honestly - they called 3 times in one day). They're fairly desperate for blood donations right now. I'll go back in this week and try again. I've even started taking pre-natal vitamins purely for the higher iron content so I can donate blood. But I'm only one person, and nothing I can do will ever be enough. It will always be something, but never enough.

In this article, Art Caplan makes the argument that the restrictions on blood donation are too strict. Specifically, he argues that it's time to start letting gay men donate blood.

I could not agree more. It hadn't even dawned on me how offensive and outdated that restriction was until I mentioned to my best friend that I was going to donate one day, and he replied, "They don't want my blood, so screw them." And then I thought about it. There is nothing, in this decade, that puts gay men at higher risk than most others. I could sleep with half of Oregon and still donate, but a gay man in a monogamous relationship is still considered high risk.

Art Caplan says:

The policy of forever excluding people who had male-to-male sex at some point during the past 30 years should have been changed a long time ago. The accuracy of the latest technology for screening blood means that there is no reason to exclude anyone as a donor in any risk group for more than a month. The question now is whether the FDA and Congress will act or simply let old prejudices, biases and fears stand in the way of supplying the nation with more badly needed blood.

The AIDS epidemic has been with us for 25 years. The policy currently governing blood donation in the United States has been with us for 22 years. Given our ability to guarantee an exceedingly safe blood supply, it is time to revisit the policy and accept blood from all Americans willing to donate. Fear and prejudice should not be allowed to kill people.

He couldn't be more right. It's a terrible policy, and the worst part of it is that I cannot imagine a great way to enact a change in the policy. I would go so far as to say that the tattoo and piercing policies are just as ridiculous. A person knows if they've been tattooed or pierced at a sterile facility. I don't imagine the type who are getting tattooed in a back alley are also lining up to donate blood. (Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but there has to be a better test or restriction than a blanket 1 year suspension on donation). I plan on getting one of the tattoos I got done in my younger days altered very soon, and my bloodbank will lose a year's worth of blood because they won't accept that those needles come right out of a clean package - never having touched another individual. I suspect when blood levels get truly low enough for serious concern, someone will take notice of the outdated policy. But it isn't as though I can stop donating out of protest (specifically for the policy on gay men) - that seems like it would do even more harm than good. But, perhaps, if each of us that donate mention to the employees at the bloodbank that this policy needs changing, perhaps, just maybe, enough voices saying the same thing will become loud enough to reach the right ears.

Originally posted to hyper-textual ontology June 18, 2006