The Stem Cell

Mark North lives in Berkeley and writes about philosophy and politics.

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by Mark North

There’s a surprising thing about today’s moral anti-science crusaders: their moderation.

Anyone who keeps up with current intellectual fads will know the Brave New World Argument. Societies that go too far with human enhancement technology, or whose scientists reach into the mysteries of the stem cell, risk becoming like the dystopia depicted in the 1932 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Francis Fukuyama for example, thinks the most significant threat from biotechnology is “the possibility that it will alter human nature and move us into a ‘posthuman stage’ of history.” Designer babies, genetic modification of behavior, and the unnatural prolongation of life are but three of the trends that suggest we may one day live in a society that resembles a “giant nursing home.”

For someone who not long ago assured us that “the end of history” was at hand, this is surprising. But leaving that aside, we don’t want to be posthuman, Fukuyama says; what we want is “to protect the full range of our complex,evolved natures against attempts at self-modification.” Advances in biotechnology and medical science should be resisted lest we accidentally, or cleverly, change ourselves into something we no longer recognize.

One of the things we recognize is the prevalence of disease. Hidden (not very subtly) in the Brave New World Argument is the view that we shouldn’t race to find cures for diseases because doing so would change our nature. This idea is often dressed up with rhetoric to argue that something called “human dignity” is at stake. To maintain dignity requires that we resist the advances of medical science and instead suffer. Leon Kass appears to be a proponent of an idea like this. In the words of one reviewer of his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, “Kass elevates suffering to a moral virtue.”

We should call this view dignitarianism. You might find this upsetting, and so do I. But not because we are ethically bound to heal the sick. Rather it doesen’t go far enough. What I find disappointing about Fukuyama, Kass and other such armchair moralizers is that they are so tame in their pronouncements. We should declare as Nietzsche did that suffering is necessary, not to maintain the virtue of dignity, but to make the entire species stronger. Increscent animi, virecit volnere virtus, Nietzsche said. “The spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding.”

Unlike weak thinkers like Kass and Fukuyama, Nietzsche could see the evolutionary benefits of suffering. After all, if we cured illnesses, the biological organism would have no reason to randomly mutate and (one day) develop resistances to disease – evolution would slow down. We need to stop thinking and researching how to cure diseases and let random mutation do its work. Otherwise we could see ourselves facing, as Fukuyama might say “The End of Evolution.”

By adopting this attitude, we can also solve a vexing religious issue: the problem of suffering and evil, much in the news lately as people flock back to religion in a global backlash against Richard Dawkins. Theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God’s goodness and justice in the face of existence of the suffering, has stumped philosophers for thousands of years.¹ Why does an omnipotent and benevolent God allow suffering in the world? The answer is simple: it’s part of the design. It gives impetus to evolution. We ignore it at our peril, and we risk species annihilation if we carry on thinking up ways to cure disease.

I agree that it is far less likely that a Parkinson’s sufferer, compared to say a healthy, tenured philosophy professor in an American university, would agree with this. In fact if I was diagnosed with Parkinsons, or Alzheimers, or any of the diseases for which there is evidence that medical science and biotechnology might produce a cure, things would look decidedly different. But so far I haven’t been, so I’ll stick to making reassuringly simple and hugely important pronouncements about human dignity and strengthening the species through suffering. It makes me feel as though I’m contributing to evolution the way God wanted me to.

¹ See Stanley Fish’s 4 November blog at the New York Times

Illustration courtesy of forma-mentis

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