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The Unnaturals
Life has a natural order which must be respected in order to achieve happiness. Most conservatives agree to that. Men and women are naturally different. Children are naturally different from adults. Suffering and death are a natural part of life, and we should be skeptical of any utopian scheme that wishes to circumvent them.
I concede all that. Yet in conceding that, I cannot help but conclude that my own existence is deeply unnatural. Let me explain.
Without the intervention of modern medicine, I would have died several times over in childhood. If you asked me whether Mother Nature intended me to be alive, the only reasonable answer I could come up with is “No”. Moreover, I’m a third-generation unnatural: the child of a child who would have died in childhood without heroic medical intervention. I married a man who has robust good health, but it’s likely that our children (should we manage to have any) will be fourth-generation unnaturals.
Moreover, asthma — the most obvious (though not the only) problem that should have caused my childhood death — intensifies with each successive generation. My siblings were luckier, some not having asthma at all. But when children with asthma are rescued from death and survive to reproduce, is it any surprise when future generations are born with worse asthma? Moreover, wouldn’t we expect similar results to hold for any heritable malady that used to kill people off before they reproduced but now — thanks to modern technology — doesn’t have to? What, if anything, does that mean for humanity as a whole?
Now, many asthmatics are highly intelligent and productive people. That is, productive if they can keep the asthma and its many comorbidities under control. Thanks to modern pharmacology, many can. Regardless, asthma is inherently an impediment to productivity and even life itself. Attempting to live a productive life with severe asthma these days involves all sorts of artificial manipulation, from consumption of artificial hormones to injecting yourself with mouse antibodies raised in hamster cells. Sometimes, even that is insufficient.
Wait, back up a sec. Injecting yourself with mouse-hamster antibodies in order to become more productive? Isn’t that sort of like transhumanism?
Well, is it?
Or what if — instead of injecting themselves with the mouse-hamster antibodies — asthmatics could inject themselves with a virus that infected their DNA with genes to express those antibodies? Would deliberately changing their DNA in this way make asthmatics any less human?
So often on Ricochet, we talk about natural-versus-unnatural in the context of death or reproduction; but if this divide is important at the endpoints of life, isn’t it more important in its midst? Where do we draw the line between natural and unnatural survival, between natural and unnatural functioning? And is it any surprise that — to unnaturals like me — the line already seems pathologically blurred? Is it any surprise that we unnaturals who respect traditionalist arguments for natural human boundaries also feel alienated from those boundaries?
What about you? Are you an unnatural, too? Has that changed your conception of what “natural” means, or if “natural” means anything at all?
Image Credit: DeviantArt user ThE-UnKO-LeMa.
Published in General
I like the idea that human life has value, that there are things we shouldn’t do to each other for the sake of convenience, or other trivial reasons. I find it comforting. But it still nags at me: what reason do I have to think that it should compel us to limit our tinkering with nature? Why is it that I find a model that includes a supernatural component to be more compelling than one based just on reason and nature, when I don’t believe in a supernatural God? Is it just because I grew up in Utah and it sort of rubbed off on me?
But twins aren’t man-made; they aren’t fabricated. We can still keep up the belief that God created them in the sense that they are “endowed by their creator with certain rights…”
Should that still apply to customized or fabricated humans? I’m inclined to say that we should treat them as full people, because they have the same brains and feelings as we do. I would feel sympathy for a clone who was mistreated or injured, same as I do a person now.
But it may be possible some day to create a race of Morlocks or what have you, capable of doing our unpleasant jobs, but without the self-awareness that they are living a narrowly circumscribed life. Would we stay cold to them? People have changed their attitudes towards animals; there is a huge controversy here about an officer who shot a guy’s dog–people literally don’t get this upset when a child is killed. We would do well to make these creatures hideously ugly, I mean not like ugly-cute like a pug, so that our sympathies would not interfere with their utility.
I have a hard time believing that the former IVF babies walking around today are anything other than creatures made in God’s image, even though how they were made in God’s image wasn’t the usual way. Moreover, I think many human beings today are customized or even fabricated in some way (breast implants?). Certain customizations may be wise or unwise, but I don’t see the whole category of customization as dehumanizing. Else I have been dehumanized.
If IVF didn’t involve discarding embryos or selective abortion (and perhaps someday it might not), how big a moral problem would it be for people?
By Customizing I mean custom genes. Are you still made in God’s image if you’ve had wolverine DNA mixed in to make you a sports legend?
I think very little, even for very religious people.
Perhaps it would have to depend on degree or intent, since it doesn’t depend on the mere presence of foreign genetic material. Transgenic organisms sometimes occur naturally. A while back there was some excitement over a sea slug that seemed to have incorporated algae DNA into its genome, making it perhaps the first documented case of natural transgenic activity between multicellular organisms. And viruses have been “customizing” humans since before we were human, though inquiring after a virus’s intent is rather pointless.
Those would indeed be rural raccoons, about medium size I guess.
Easily my best laugh of the day.
I’m in favor of genetic engineering for now, since what is on the drawing board is mostly about problem solving, like eliminating gene combinations that lead to disease or disability. If we get to the point that people start customizing their babies because they’ve always wanted a 7-foot tall daughter or a kid with feathers, that’s a problem. Regardless of customizations, these are human babies and they should not be modified just because their parents have a quirky sense of humor.
Well there ya go. Country critters don’t grasp the concept of “vehicular crittercide” as well as city critters who study the issue on a daily basis and regularly conduct symposia on the question.
I have it easy. The Torah says the world was created imperfect, and it is our job to make it better.
Indeed, theHebrew opposite for “holy” is most literally translated as “raw” or “beginning state.”
As such, it is holy work to improve upon the natural world in every sense (art elevates pigments just as medicine elevates physiology).
But Midge, we don’t know what your future holds, or ours. And so, we preserve your life, and that of others, when within our resources and knowledge, in anticipation of virtuous and positive contributions to our world.
As far as manipulating DNA, human or otherwise, we must be willing to accept the consequences of our manipulation…
“Where do we draw the line between natural and unnatural survival, between natural and unnatural functioning?”
The place I start, even if I allow that I might end up drawing some distinctions later, is that everything man does is natural, part of his nature. Man is part of nature. Everything he invents, all medicine, every triumph over the limits of the non-human part of the natural world, is natural. The property of naturality is sort of transitive (though transitivity is, strictly speaking, a feature of relations).
So what I expect you’re seeing there is academics testing Raccoons for aspects of intelligence that academics find appealing, and therefore declaring them intelligent, because they are similar to academics.
Hadn’t read this before last night’s AMU, Midge, but, as an unnatural, too (born @ 5 months gestation, hospital just got its incubator *that day*) I’m glad we’re both here! Talk to you after rehearsals.
It is an illusion if you think natural and unnatural in this context. Does this make you any less in the image of the Creator? I thought most discussion of natural vs. unnatural had more to do with behavior.
Altering your (or your child’s) body is a behavior, though. And I’m not saying this distinction between natural and unnatural isn’t an illusion, just that it’s a distinction that might occur to some people given the way that (possibly other) people use the term.
For a second there I thought I was on the IQ thread.
Wakka wakka wakka!