Babel Builders and Blastocysts: Baby Making and Medical Miracles in the Modern Age

So, I was going to write an article about Charlemagne and conservative politics, but then I read about an experiment that may be bringing us closer to human cloning. You read that last sentence right, closer. We aren’t there yet and thank God for that. Of course, the experiment was intended to fight disease. We are humanitarians after all and who would want to do anything evil for evil’s sake? Well, as the old saying goes: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And unfortunately my technologically skeptical self thinks the road to human cloning may be paved with medical miracles.

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, cloning scares me, human cloning in particular. I’ll put aside my religious objections to the practice (and I assure you they are myriad) and just pose a question: how often do we as human beings look to the future and attempt to foresee the consequences of our actions? Is not a lack of foresight something our parents warned us about?  Can one technology falling in to the wrong hands create chaos?
Of course, these are just questions, questions I will leave you to answer, but I have a sneaking suspicion that human cloning may be a place to start drawing lines.

Robert J. Oppenheimer is said to have regretted the creation of the atomic bomb because he realized it opened up a world of fear and terror that was unthinkable. We got that world; it was called the Cold War. Many would argue that if we hadn’t invented it the Russians or the Germans or the Japanese or the Ugandans or some unfathomable barbaric other would have. While I do not exactly buy that argument, I think this situation is fundamentally different. There is no race, at least not that I can see. There is little need to rush toward human cloning, or even toward the cure for all of our horrific diseases (many of which are created by our sad, existentially un-aware lifestyle, which is a product of this quest for medical miracles, but that’s not another issue for another post).

Is our desire to cure all these diseases not a desire for immortality? And when has that ever gone well in any story ever written in human history? News flesh: it’s always the bad guy who desires corporeal immortality, not the good guy. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for modern medical technology. I have Crohn’s Disease and would be long dead without specific medications and such. In fact, I was born by Caesarean Section, meaning that a couple of hundred years ago, I probably would not have even made it out of the womb. But you know what? If I had to die so that this world would never have had to cope with issues like physician-assisted suicide, modern medical euthanasia, and modern medical abortions, then so be it. Our quest for immortality has prolonged life without necessarily improving quality of life. I must take six or seven pills a day, and seventeen on Wednesdays, just to maintain what we call normal health.Now clearly I’m okay with existing, but the point is that our quest for immortality has had consequences, consequences that those who conceived of this quest (I’m looking at you Condorcet) didn’t foresee.

In fact, the Marquis de Condorcet is a wonderful example of being cannibalized by unexamined hope. He was a partisan of the Enlightenment who hoped that science would bring human beings to immortality and eternal comfort (we’re certainly very comfortable in our obese, sedentary society today). He even supported the French Revolution (a good Burkean could never agree). But, in one of history’s most fittingly ironic moments, he was killed by the revolutionaries for being of aristocratic heritage. Case in point: when you don’t examine the probable consequences of your actions, you suffer.

Now you might be thinking, what does any of this have to do with an experiment dealing with the cloning of human cells? Well, I fear that we may end up with horrific consequences in the name of future medical panaceas. It would be unwise of me to declare that we must stop such research for fear of the consequences; that would be pre-emptively reactionary. But I would caution all of the world’s scientists and all of my readers (I hope I’m up to four by now!) against a blind hope in the future. You can be Jay Gatsby if you want, but it may end with you being shot dead in your pool by a man you’ve never seen before. Be cautious and think about where these experiments might lead; weigh the consequences and try to understand what it is we as human being should really be wanting. What use is immortality without morality? Why should we live forever and reproduce ourselves in a genetically identical manner if we still can’t explain what being is? How can we as a society cope with a world filled with others that are in fact ourselves? These are not easy questions and this post is not meant to give answers, but it is intended to oppose a blind faith in progress, a belief that an inevitable good will come out of this vainglorious quest (well, my opinion just came out). Keep in mind the words of that most intelligent and wise of authors, Tolkien: “even the wise cannot see all ends.”