he urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century, successfully waged against to-

talitarianisms of the right and of the left, seems to have blinded many people to a deeper and ultimately darker truth about the present age: nearly all contemporary societies, East as well as West, are traveling briskly in the same utopian direction. Nearly all are wedded to the modern technological project; all march eagerly to the drums of progress and fly proudly the banner of modern science; all sing loudly the Baconian anthem, “Conquer nature, relieve man’s estate” Leading the tri-umphal procession is modern medicine, which is daily becoming ever more powerful in its battle against dis-ease, decay and death, thanks especially to astonishing achievements in biomedical science and technology—achievements for which we must surely be grateful.

Yet contemplating present and projected advances

in genetic and reproductive technolo-gies, in neuroscience and psychophar-macology, in the development of artificial organs and computer-chip implants for human brains, and in research to retard aging, we now clearly recognize new uses for bio-technical power that soar beyond the traditional medical goals of healing

disease and relieving suf-fering. Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and neuropsychic “enhancement,” for whole-sale redesign. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. For anyone who cares preserving humanity, the time has come to pay attention.

Some transforming powers are already here. The Pill. In vitro fertilization. Bottled embryos. Surrogate wombs. Cloning. Genetic screening. Genetic manipu-lation. Organ harvesting. Mechanical spare parts. Chi-meras. Brain implants. Ritalin for the young, Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone. And to leave this vale of tears, a little extra morphine accompanied by Muzak.

Facing a Posthuman Future 2002

Leon R. Kass, appointed to chair the new President’s Council on Bio-ethics by George W. Bush in 2001, reflects on what it means to be and remain human in the age of biotechnology

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Dreams to be realized? There are some who are delighted by this state of

affairs: some scientists and biotechnologists, their entrepreneurial backers and a cheering claque of sci-fi enthusiasts, futurologists and libertarians. There are dreams to be realized, powers to be exercised, honors to be won and money—big money—to be made. But many of us are worried, and not, as pro-ponents of the revolution self-servingly claim, be-cause we are either ignorant of science or afraid of

the unknown. To the contrary, we can see all too clearly where the train is headed, and we do not like the destination. We can distinguish cleverness about means from wisdom about ends, and we are loath to entrust the future of the race to those who cannot tell the differ-ence. No friend of humanity cheers for a posthuman future.

Yet for all our disquiet, we have until now done nothing to prevent it. We hide our heads in the sand because we enjoy the blessings that medicine keeps

s soon as I had acquired some general notions re-specting Physics, and beginning to make trial of

them in various particular difficulties, had observed how far they can carry us, and how much they differ from the principles that have been employed up to the present time, I believed that I could not keep them concealed without sinning grievously against the law by which we are bound to promote, as far as in us lies, the general good of mankind. For by them I perceived it to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life; and in room of the Speculative Philosophy usually taught in the Schools, to discover a Practical, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artizans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and pos-sessors of nature.

And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to the invention of an infinity of arts, by which we

might be enabled to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, and all its comforts, but also and especially for the preservation of health, which is with-out doubt, of all the blessings of this life, the first and fundamental one; for the mind is so intimately de-pendent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I

believe that it is in Medicine they must be sought for. It is true that the science of Medicine, as it now ex-ists, contains few things whose util-ity is very remarkable: but without any wish to depreciate it, I am confident that there is no one, even among those whose profession it is, who does not admit that all at pre-sent known in it is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered; and that we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had suffi-ciently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies pro-vided for us by Nature.

Lords and Possessors of Nature 1637

René Descartes sought to forge a new philosophy of science in his influential Discourse on Method. Leon Kass identifies it as a founding document of the modern scientific attempt to place nature under rational human control

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supplying, or we rationalize our inaction by declar-ing that human engineering is inevitable and we cannot stop it. In either case, we are complicit in pre-paring for our own degradation, and in some respects are more to blame than the bio-zealots who, however misguided, are putting their money where their mouth is. Denial and despair, unattractive outlooks in any situation, become morally reprehensible when circum-stances summon us to keep the world safe for human flourishing. Our immediate ancestors, taking up the challenge of their time, rose to the occasion and res-cued the human future from the cruel dehumanization of Nazi and Soviet tyranny. It is our more difficult task to find ways to preserve it from the soft dehumani-zation of well-meaning but hubristic biotechnical “re-creationism”—and to do it without under-mining bio-medical science or rejecting its genuine contributions to human welfare.

We know it will not be easy, for many features of modern life will conspire to frustrate efforts aimed to-ward human control of the biomedical project. First, we Americans believe in technological automatism; where we do not foolishly believe that all innovation is progress, we fatalistically believe that it is inevitable. (“If it can be done, it will be done, like it or not.”) Sec-ond, we believe in free-dom: the freedom of scientists to inquire, the freedom of technolo-gists to develop, the freedom of entrepreneurs to invest and to profit, the freedom of private citizens to make use of existing technologies to satisfy any and all personal desires. Third, the biomedical enter-prise occupies the moral high ground of compassionate humanitar-ianism, up-holding the supreme values of modern life-cure dis-ease, prolong life, relieve suffering—in competition with which other moral goods rarely stand a chance. (“What the public wants is not to be sick,” says Nobel laureate James Watson, “and if we help them not to be sick, they'll be on our side.”)

There are still other obstacles. Our cultural plural-ism and easy-going relativism make it difficult to reach consensus on what we should embrace and what we should oppose; and serious moral objections to this or that biomedical practice are often facilely dis-missed as religious or sectarian. Many people are un-willing to pronounce judgments about what is good or

bad, right or wrong, even in matters of great im-portance, even for themselves-never mind for others or for society as a whole. It also does not help that the biomedical project is now deeply entangled with com-merce: there are increasingly powerful economic inter-ests in favor of going full steam ahead, and no eco-nomic interests in favor of going slow. Since we live in a democracy, moreover, we face political diffi-culties in gaining a consensus to direct our future, and we have almost no political experience in trying to curtail or even slow down the devel-opment of any new biomedical technology. Finally, and perhaps most troubling, our views of the meaning of our humanity have been so transformed by the scientific-technological approach to the world and to life that we are in danger of forgetting what we have to lose, hu-manly speaking.

Questioning the foundations of our ethics Everything depends on whether the technological

disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral and po-litical rule. But here, I regret to say, the news so far is not encouraging. For the relevant intellectual, spiritual and moral resources of our society, the legacy of civi-lizing traditions painfully acquired and long preserved, are taking a beating—not least because they are being called into question by the findings of modern science itself. The technologies present troublesome ethical dilemmas, but the underlying scientific notions call into question the very foundations of our ethics.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the challenge came in the form of Darwinism and its seeming opposition to biblical religion, a battle initi-ated not so much by the scientists as by the be-leaguered defenders of orthodoxy. In our own time, the challenge comes from molecular biology, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, fueled by their practitioners’ overconfident belief in the sufficiency of their reductionist explanations of all vital and human phenomena. Never mind “created in the image of God”; what elevated humanistic view of human life or human goodness is defensible against the belief, as-serted by most public and prophetic voices of biology, that man is just a collection of molecules, an accident

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on the stage of evolution, a freakish speck of mind in a mindless universe, fundamentally no different from other living—or even nonliving—things? What chance have our treasured ideas of freedom and dignity against the reductive notion of “the selfish gene” (or, for that matter, of “genes for altruism”), the belief that DNA is the essence of life, or the teaching that all hu-man behavior and our rich inner life are rendered intel-ligible only in terms of their contributions to species survival and reproductive success?

Does this mean that I am therefore in favor of igno-rance, suffering and death? Of killing the goose of ge-netic technology even before she lays her golden eggs? Surely not. But unless we mobilize the courage to look foursquare at the full human meaning of our new enterprise in biogenetic technology and engineering, we are doomed to become its creatures if not its slaves. Important though it is to set a moral boundary here, devise a regulation there, hoping to decrease the dam-age caused by this or that little rivulet, it is even more important to be sober about the true nature and mean-ing of the flood itself.

That our exuberant new biolo-gists and their technological min-ions might be persuaded of this is, to say the least, highly unlikely. For all their ingenuity, they do not even seek the wisdom that just might yield the kind of knowledge that keeps human life human. But it is not too late for the rest of us to be-come aware of the dangers—not just to privacy or insurability, but to our very humanity. So aware, we might be better able to defend the increasingly beleaguered vestiges and principles of our human dig-nity, even as we continue to reap the considerable benefits that ge-netic technology will inevitably provide.

Lost at sea We learn to prevent all genetic

disease, but only by turning pro-creation into manufacture. We have

safe and shame-free sex, but little romance or lasting intimacy. We find a perfect “soma” that can cure de-pression and relieve anxiety, but its unpreventable spread produces people who know and want only chemically induced satisfactions. We live much longer, but can't remember why we wanted to.

The new biology that brings us these dilemmas can, by its very value-neutral self-definition, provide us neither knowledge nor guid-ance for dealing with them. Worse, the scientific teachings themselves chal-lenge and embarrass the existing pre-scientific or reli-gious notions of better and worse, and of human life more generally, on the basis of which we have made—and still make—moral judgments; on the basis of which we have lived—and still live—our lives. The project for the mastery of nature, even as it provides lim-itless powers, leaves the “master” lost at sea: Lacking knowledge of ends and goals, lacking stan-dards of good and bad, right and wrong, we know not who we are nor where we are going. Yet we travel fast and freely, progressively achieving our own estrange-

Osama bin Laden and James D. Watson: Two threats to the human future?

ment—from our communities, from our nature, from our very selves.

Despite these obvious practical and moral threats to our humanity, scientists and others often refuse to rec-ognize the danger, and even object to the term “dehumanization.” For how, they ask, can science or technology be dehumanizing when these activities are themselves the expression of our highest humanity—of our curiosity and courage, our cleverness and dexter-ity, our energy and indus-try, our rationality and per-fectibility? But not everything of human origin is hu-manizing in effect. Man does not live by rationality alone. Indeed, the foundations of our humanity-our sentiments, loves, attitudes, mores and character, as well as the familial, social, religious and political insti-tutions that nourish and are nourished by them—are

not laid by scientific reason or rational technique, and may, in truth, be undermined by them, especially if our much-vaunted scientific rationality is philosophically unsound and finally unreasonable.

Steering a middle course Thus, just as we must do battle with antimodern fa-

naticism and barbaric disregard for human life, so we must avoid runaway scientism and the utopian project to remake humankind in the image of our choosing. To safeguard the human future rests on our ability to steer a prudent middle course, avoiding the inhuman Osama bin Ladens on the one side and the posthuman Brave New Worlders on the other. Unfortunately, we are not yet aware of the gravity of our situation.

This editorial cartoon first appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1977, at the height of the controversy surrounding the recent de-velopment of recombinant DNA techniques.

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little more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek culture and philosophy

were introduced throughout the lands conquered by Alexander the Great. The inherent power of Greek phi-losophy as an analytic tool ensured its continued popu-larity, even as it was adapted to scores of different reli-gious and cultural traditions. It served, of course, as the foundation for the fiercely logical and systematic way of thinking that enabled Rome to conquer all of the “known world,” including not only Palestine, where Christianity originated, but also every city in which Christ’s disciples preached. It was natural, then, for early Christians to use some of the dominant language and concepts as they spread the Word.

As the world discovered, the greatest Greek phi-losophers were, first, Plato and, second, Aristotle. The most significant difference between them concerned

the relationship between the intellect and physical reality or, in other words, between humankind and na-ture. Plato believed that the soul ex-ists in a realm quite apart from the body and that the thinker is separate from the world he thinks about. But Aristotle felt that everything in our intellect comes from the senses, and

thus the thinker is powerfully connected to the world he thinks about. This dispute began in ancient Greece and continued throughout the early history of Christian thought, through the Middle Ages, and up to the sev-enteenth century.

One of the most influential thinkers in the early Church, Saint Augustine, recounts how attracted he was, early in the fifth century, to Plato’s view of the physical world and how he struggled to overcome his love of Platonic theory before he could “rationalize” his acceptance of Christ’s true message. Indeed, this tension—which still exists—has been described by the theologian Michael Novak as the “great temptation of the West.” For example, throughout the first five cen-turies of Christianity, the heresy of Gnosticism—which portrayed physical reality as an illusion—drew powerfully upon Plato’s conception of a disembodied

Earth in the Balance 1992

Al Gore, the former Senator and Vice President, locates the historical roots of our current environmental problems in the philosophy of Plato, Descartes and Bacon.

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spiritual intellect hovering above the material world. But even after the Gnostic view was formally rejected, it periodically resurfaced in various guises, and the Platonic assumption upon which it was based—that man is separate from the world of nature—continued to flourish as a major strain of Christian thought. It may have been overemphasized because of early strug-gles with paganism.

The heritage of Aristotle’s thought, on the other hand, was kept alive principally in the Arabic-speaking world. Alexander, who was tutored by Aristotle, estab-lished his thought throughout the lands he conquered, and the city he chose as his capital, Alexandria, be-came the greatest center of learning in the ancient world. But for many centuries the West was isolated from this intellectual tradition; only after the returning crusaders brought new ideas back to Europe did the West rediscover the other half of its Greek heri-tage. As the thirteenth century began, Euro-peans impressed with the intellectual achievements of Arab civilization discov-ered and translated several works by Aris-totle—Ethics, Politics, Logic, among oth-ers—which had disappeared from West-ern thought but had been preserved in Arabic. Influenced by the powerful work of Maimonides, the Jewish scholar writ-ing in Arabic (in Alexandria) who reinter-preted Judaism in Aristotelian terms, Saint Thomas Aquinas undertook the same reinter-pretation of Christian thought and antago-nized the Church establishment with his as-sertions of an Aristotelian view of the rela-tionship between the spirit and the flesh, be-tween humankind and the world. He saw a philosophical closeness between the soul and physical reality that discomfited the Church. Although his books were banned, burned, and not widely read until almost three centuries later,

his powerful thinking eventually played a role in the Church’s acquiescence to the impulses that led to the Renaissance, including the impulse to reconnect with the earth. A classic painting by Raphael in 1510 por-trays this same philosophical tension at the beginning of the Renaissance: Plato appears with one finger pointing toward the heavens; next to him, Aristotle is gesturing toward the earth.

But just a century later, the reemerging Aristotelian view was dealt a severe blow. On November 10, 1619, René Descartes, soon to become one of the founders of modern philosophy, was a twenty-three-year-old mathematician lying on the banks of the Danube. That day he had a startling vision of a mechanistic world filled with inanimate matter, moving predictably in mathematically determined patterns—patterns that could be discerned and mastered by analytical minds

This detail from Raphael’s fresco, The School of Ath-ens (1510), portrays Plato, on the left, pointing up-wards to the realm of abstract thought and intellectual idealism; Aristotle, on the right, gestures towards the earth, which he argued was the ultimate source—through our senses—of all our thoughts.

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through sustained inquiry and detached observation. In a real sense, Descartes’ vision initiated the scientific revolution. It is often said that “all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato,” and much of the credit for this should go to the work of Descartes, who broke through the tension in the seventeenth century between the ideas of Aristotle and Plato with his famous dictum, Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.”

By the time Descartes had finished his life’s work, Raphael’s picture was obsolete as a representation of Western thought. The new modern person pointed de-cisively upward - away from nature, away from the earth—toward an ethereal realm from which the de-tached human intellect could observe the movement of matter everywhere in the universe. Floating some-where above it all, this new disembodied mind could systematically and relentlessly decipher the scientific laws that would eventually enable us to understand na-ture—and control it. This strange relationship between spirit and nature would later be called that of the “ghost in the machine.”

The Church, meanwhile, was supposed to be on guard against any Faustian effort of the people to gain unseemly power to alter God’s world, but it fell victim once again to the Platonic vision by reducing its spiri-tual mission to an effort to guide the inner life of the mind while discounting the moral significance of hu-mankind’s manipulations of the natural world. Sir Francis Bacon, lord chancellor of England, author of The New Atlantis (1624) and one of the principal foun-ders of the scientific method, undertook to ease any doubts the Church might have about allowing human-kind to acquire and exercise the vast new powers of science. Taking “Cartesian dualism” one step further, Bacon argued that not only were humans separate from nature; science, he said, could safely be regarded as separate from religion. In his view, “facts” derived through the scientific method had no moral signifi-cance in and of themselves; only “moral knowledge” of matters concerning the distinction between good and evil had religious significance. This facile distinc-tion carried a profound implication: the new power de-rived from scientific knowledge could be used to dominate nature with moral impunity.

Thus began the long, 350-year separation of sci-

ence and religion. The astronomical discoveries of Co-pernicus and Galileo had earlier upset the Church’s peaceful coexistence with science, but neither man had intentionally challenged the primacy of the Church’s moral teachings as the basis for interpreting the new facts discovered from observing the universe. How-ever, Bacon suggested a moral detour: facts need not be considered in light of their implications. Not long afterward, the Church came to consider science as an adversary, as it posed challenge after challenge to the Church’s authority to explain the meaning of exis-tence.

This fundamental shift in Western thinking—which in a very real sense marks the beginning of modern history—gave humankind increasing dominance in the world, as a flood of scientific discoveries began unlocking the secrets of God’s blueprint for the uni-verse. But how could this new power be used wisely? Descartes and Bacon ensured the gradual abandonment of the philosophy that humankind is one vibrant strand in an elaborate web of life, matter, and meaning. And ironically, major scientific discoveries have often un-dermined the Church’s tendency to exaggerate our uniqueness as a species and defend our separation from the rest of nature. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species claimed jurisdiction for science over the hu-man physical form by placing our evolution in the con-text of the animal world. Half a century later, Sigmund Freud’s explanation of the unconscious claimed part of the mind for nature as well. Thanks to the revolution in thinking they helped to start, it seemed to many that the rational portion of the intellect—that part that cre-ated science—became the only remaining province for the moral authority of the Church.

* lthough Plato searched for a single cause behind all things, he attempted to discern their nature by lo-

cating them in relation to only one point of refer-ence—human intellect—rather than through a process of philosophical triangulation, which would have re-lied on two points, humankind and the Creator (or what could also be called a single cause). By assuming that the human intellect is not anchored in a context of meaningful relationships, with both the physical world and the Creator, Plato assured that later explanations

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of the workings of the world would become progres-sively more abstract.

Francis Bacon is a case in point. His moral confu-sion—the confusion at the heart of much of modern science—came from his assumption, echoing Plato, that human intellect could safely analyze and under-stand the natural world without reference to any moral principles defining our relationship and duties to both God and God’s creation. Bacon, for example, was able to enthusiastically advocate vivisection for the pure joy of learning without reference to any moral pur-pose, such as saving human lives, as justification for the act.

And tragically, since the onset of the scientific and technological revolution, it has seemingly become all too easy for ultrarational minds to create an elaborate edifice of clockwork efficiency capable of nightmarish cruelty on an industrial scale. But for the separation of science and religion, we might not be pumping so much gaseous chemical waste into the atmosphere and threatening the destruction of the earth’s climate bal-ance. But for the separation of useful technological know-how and the moral judgments to guide its use, we might not be slashing and burning one football

field’s worth of rain forest every second. But for the assumed separation of humankind from nature, we might not be destroying half the living species on earth in the space of a single lifetime. But for the separation of thinking and feeling, we might not tolerate the deaths every day of 37,000 children under the age of five from starvation and preventable diseases made worse by failures of crops and politics. But we do tol-erate—and collectively perpetrate—all these things. They are going on right now.

The Cartesian approach to the human story allows us to believe that we are separate from the earth, enti-tled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate col-lection of resources that we can exploit however we like; and this fundamental misperception has led us to current crisis. The old story of God’s covenant with both the earth and humankind, and its assignment to human beings of the role of good stewards and faithful servants, was—before it was misinterpreted and twisted in the service of the Cartesian world view—a powerful, noble, and just explanation of who we are in relation to God’s earth. What we need today is a fresh telling of our story with the distortions removed.

Gore believes that the worldviews of Plato, Descartes and Bacon all contribute to environmental catastrophe. Do you think he would also consider James Watson’s vision of nature a dangerous misinterpretation of humanity’s place in nature?

Selections from Leon Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity (2002), René Descartes Discourse on Method (1637), and Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1992)