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