Leonardo

Will biotechnology give us wings? Make us posthuman? Damage us irreparably? These are a few of the possibilities that Bill McKibben considers in Enough. According to McKibben, biotechnology will soon be able to deliver better health, greater intelligence, longer lives, genetically determined happiness and maybe even dazzling good looks. However, if we pursue these goals through germline engineering, the costs will be prohibitively high. According to McKibben, germline engineering, which involves making genetic changes that can be inherited, will "break us free from the bonds of our past and present" and make our children into "putty." This will lead to an "arms race" of all against all, in which parents will be forced to engineer their

offspring or be considered negligent to the point of child abuse. Every engineered baby will be followed by more advanced models. "Once the game is under way," McKibben warns, "there won't be moral decisions, only strategic ones." A host of unprecedented family problems will arise. Children will acquire characteristics of consumer products. There will be children seen as "upgrades" from older siblings and engineered children considered "lemons." Some parents will suffer buyer's remorse. Consumer decisions will create a genetically based class system, and this will eventually lead to new, posthuman species, with interspecies violence to follow.

McKibben's warnings about keep-up-with-the-Joneses genetic engineering bear consideration if only because his picture of the future derives from predictions made by advocates of germline engineering. For example, in his 1997 book Remaking Eden, Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, wrote that germline engineering to eliminate severe inherited disease would "ease society's trepidation" and open the door to other sorts of gene enhancement, such as improving intelligence. Silver "conservatively" speculates that by 2350 society may be divided into 10% "GenRich," or genetically enhanced individuals, and 90% "Naturals," or unenhanced individuals. The GenRich would control everything: the economy, the media, entertainment, "the knowledge industry," art. Silver envisions Homo sapiens divided into four species by 2600, and by 2750 into more than a dozen. Eventually millions of human-derived species may be scattered across the galaxy. Silver's vision of the distant future is epic, and he is a lucid writer, especially when he describes biotechnological techniques. However, he has a weakness for absurdly grandiose statements such as "We, as human beings, have tamed the fire of life." He also gives very limited attention to the suffering that biotechnology is almost certain to produce.

McKibben argues that germline engineering not only will damage families and cause social disruption, but will lead to widespread loss of meaning. Biotechnology, he believes, is the culmination of a long historical process, greatly accelerated by the industrial revolution, that favors individuals over context, and leads to empowered but pitifully isolated and disconnected people. Germline engineering will eliminate the last source of meaning: the individual self. This will take place because an engineered "self" is not a true self, but something more like a robot. "We will float silently away into the vacuum of meaninglessness."

McKibben does not use the word soul, but that is what he suggests when he characterizes the true self as a providentially given, unchanging essence and a primary source of meaning. This concept of self, however, is a cultural construct. Buddhist and other civilizations have flourished without cultivating it and without unleashing epidemics of meaninglessness. Science conceptualizes human beings as exquisitely intricate electro-chemical phenomena operating within much larger, almost infinitely complex material contexts. According to common, present-day cultural values, we already bear qualified comparison to robots.

Since McKibben's concept of the self is nostalgic and dubious, his argument that engineered people will be essentially different from the rest of us is also dubious. He provides no convincing evidence that for them life will not continue to be a succession of surprises, intermittently a profound mystery, and mathematically so improbable as to constitute a miracle.

This is not to say that germline engineering may not reshape our species or cause suffering. Quite the contrary. McKibben does a service by highlighting some profoundly troubling possibilities. He argues that we may already have gone far enough along certain technological paths. He favors some kinds of innovation, for example gene therapies that are somatic and not inheritable, but draws a line at germline engineering and at the world-destroying potentialities of robotics and nanotechnology. He believes that anything with the power to make us posthuman should arouse our deepest skepticism. The momentum of the new technologies may be difficult to stop, but momentum is merely inertia and has never had anything to do with progress—that is, if progress consists of movement toward human fulfillment. More to the point, we cannot predict the future. McKibben believes that flat statements that technological innovation is inevitable are ruses to stop discussion before it can begin.

What drives technological innovation? McKibben quotes leading innovators to suggest that in our time a basic force is hatred of life. For example, robotics pioneer Hans Moravec, reflecting on an Isaac Asimov story about an android who wanted to become a human, said (with his typically aggressive use of the second person), "Why in hell do you want to become a man when you're something better to begin with? It's like a human being wanting to become an ape. 'Gee, I really wish I had more hair, that I stooped more, smelled worse, lived a shorter life span.'" No doubt Moravec speaks for many. The very widespread belief that we may go extinct arises both from awareness of the immense destructive power of high technology and from disgust with what we are, or have become. Today there are plenty of reasons to loathe our species. Who has not felt at one time or another that we deserve to go extinct? McKibben acknowledges this inner crisis, but does not address it. His appeals to reason and essential goodness are inadequate in the face of extinction's appeal and the misanthropy of leading scientists. This is the most serious weakness of the book.

I am less sanguine than McKibben about who we are, which paradoxically makes me less pessimistic about the prospect of germline engineering. He points out that for a while germline engineering will be extremely expensive, so only a small minority will be able to afford it, but he does not explore the implications of this. From a Darwinian perspective, wealth today functions counterintuitively: it affords no obvious evolutionary advantages. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between income and education on the one hand, and number of offspring on the other. As a group the poor, or rather the relatively uneducated working poor, are indeed blessed when it comes to progeny. The rich tend to be Darwinian losers.

Furthermore, no one really knows how biologically advantageous, as distinct from socially advantageous, characteristics such as slimness, athletic ability and intelligence are. Unless they produce more progeny, they have no Darwinian advantages. A potato-shaped, dimwitted nonentity with a swarm of children is biologically superior to a brilliant public figure, streamlined as a cheetah and childless. In other words, from an evolutionary standpoint it may not matter whether most of the germline manipulations that McKibben mentions take place: they may amount to genetic froth. The market has always generated froth. Capitalism, which moved onto the [End Page 342] world stage with trade in sugar and tobacco, involves bypassing our evolutionary defenses and exploiting our genetic weaknesses. We are the animal who plays tricks on itself. Consumer culture is the trickster spirit incarnate.

McKibben makes a convincing case that we would be wise to favor sustained public debate about germline engineering and to exercise great caution about this immensely powerful and potentially disruptive technology. If, however, our society does go down the path of germline engineering, there is something to be said for having the rich, the well-educated and the self-loathing conduct the first experiments on their own children.

When the poet Edith Sitwell was a child in the 1890s she had a slight curvature of the spine. In her autobiography she tells how her father, Sir George Sitwell, who would tolerate no imperfections in his offspring, had her subjected to the best available medical treatment of the time. "The steel Bastille" was a metal contraption that encased young Edith's body and caused her excruciating pain. Only the rich could afford this particular torture or permit this particular childhood. It is not inconceivable that humanity will learn important lessons from the rich about the consequences of germline engineering, just as earlier generations learned from the cruel and useless medical treatments that premodern doctors inflicted on aristocrats and their children. Today most of what we need to learn is what not to do. [End Page 343]