Critical Faith, Faithful Criticism
By Charles Rush
March 14, 2004
Matthew 27: 15-26
like sheep were all led astray…” Most
often in human history injustice and sin have worked, not through individuals,
but through the crowd, where is easier to really let loose our deep-seated
prejudice, to deflect responsibility for it by sheer force of collective
solidarity.
Every era has its
prejudices and they are obvious to succeeding generations. We can all stand
back like the child Scout in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and wonder just why they
didn't get it, why they couldn't see that the seeds of racial separation would
eventually be their undoing. Likewise, it is equally difficult for us to get it
about our own era. We are too close to it and we are surrounded by too many
others who, like us, participate in it.
I was reminded
of the difficulty of standing outside the crowd mentality of our age, not by a
child, but by the political philosopher Michael Sandel who teaches at Harvard. He wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly that tried to brush one
of the moral and spiritual challenges of our age in a way that gets at things
we hold so commonly and so deeply, we don't really see them.[1]
You have to
think with a wide-angle lens. In three centuries, when history is written, what
will scholars focus on? There will be a number of things important to us that
will likely recede completely from their discussion, hopefully terrorism being
one of them. The weight of their
focus will be on the new chapter that we opened in the evolutionary history of
our species, when we mapped the genetic structure of our DNA and opened the
door to literally being able to alter the course of our development.
As Sandel
notes, the real moral question before us is not genetic technology as such. It
is the broader spiritual question about the mastery of nature. What is wrong,
he asks, with designer children? What is wrong with the pursuit of perfection?
Sandel notes that our culture, broadly speaking, is deeply invested in the
pursuit of perfection and he wonders if we are really up to the moral and
spiritual challenges that genetic engineering are likely to pose for us very
soon?
The genetic possibilities in the near
future are beguiling. In the past decade
researchers have manipulated a memory-linked gene for the work horse of genetic
research, the fruit fly, that produced flies with
photographic memories.[2] I
sense a market there. I know when I was in college, I had no interest in
actually working, I just wanted to be a natural
genius. Unfortunately, I was dim-witted, so I had to settle for becoming
educated instead. I think all of my fraternity brothers fell in this category.
Other studies
on mice have developed memory enhancement that allows them to learn faster and
retain information longer and keep the capacity going into old age. The original
research on memory was done to counter-act Alzheimer's disease and dementia but
the enhancements also work on healthy mice as well. As these become available
humans, we may shortly find ourselves in a situation where their widespread use
allows us to develop a whole society like unto that of Lake Wobegon where 'all the children are above
average'. If we were able to safely give our children enhanced memory, who
wouldn't do it? People may not talk about it, but quietly a whole bunch of
people would do it.
Likewise, research originally done on the prevention of
muscle deterioration in old age has also developed a synthetic gene that can be
injected into the muscles of mice that not only prevents normal muscle
deterioration, it can turn normal mice into something of a new species we might
label Rodentius Arnoldus Schwarzenagerus -- the whiskered beef cake.
Barry
Bonds, put away your silly little steroids, we've got a shot that will have you
swatting the ball 500 feet well into your 50's. Again, if Dad's across this
country could safely give their boys and girls enhanced muscle tone, there
would be a whole lot of people that would do it, even if they didn't talk about
it publicly.
Similar
treatments will likely be available for the manipulation of height, not as
driving a concern admittedly, although there are quite a few people that would
just as soon add a few inches to their children if they could, given all the
studies that correlate height and leadership, etc..
Finally,
sex selection will likely be controllable in the not to far distant future and,
as you probably know, world wide that remains the single most important desired
control factor in reproduction- people want boys- a sad fact, but a fact. World
wide, there is an expanding market here.
In
all likelihood, our grandchildren will be able to produce enhancements for sex,
height, brains, and muscle as they birth our great-grand children. Hopefully,
we will also be able to screen for certain diseases as well. But the control
that we will have in a few short decades will be breath-taking and inevitable.
The question is are we morally and spiritually mature enough to deal with it?
Morally speaking, just because we can, ought we to?
These
moral choices have been growing with us for some time ever since the advent of
frozen embryo's and sperm banks. "A few years ago some Ivy Legue newspapers ran an ad seeking an egg from a woman who
was at least five feet ten inches tall and athletic, had no major family
medical problems, and had a combined SAT score of 1400 or above. The ad offered
$50,000 for an egg from a donor with these traits. More recently a Web site was
launched claiming to auction eggs from fashion models whose photos appeared on
the site, at starting bids of $15,000 to $150,000."[3]
There
is something vaguely troubling about the commercialization of genetic beauty
and brains. But, why is that more morally objectionable than the
commercialization of any reproduction? We are not inherently troubled by giving
infertile people the opportunity to have children through the purchase of donor
eggs or donor sperm. What is it about this new eugenic approach that causes us
difficulty?
Don't
we attempt to give our children advantages in life wherever we can? Don't we
hire a tutor for them when they have difficulty in French? If we can afford it,
don't we buy them private education to give them a more rounded opportunity to
develop and get into a better college of their choice? Don't we provide them
athletic opportunities and pay for their musical lessons in the hopes that they
will forge new skill sets that make them rounded and able to develop these
skills in ways that open up doors for them in the future? We want them to go to
the best colleges, meet the most important people, develop
to their fullest potential. What exactly is the difference between giving them
an edge in these ways and giving them an edge through the development of
eugenics?
Sandel
points out that we are living through a dramatic spiritual change in terms of
how much we control versus how much we have to accept as given in our world.
One only has to think back one generation let alone 1000 years to remember just
how much more control and responsibility we assume for our family development
and its future destiny.
Up
until now, when our children were born, we appreciated them for what they were,
"not as objects of our design or products of our will or instruments of
our ambition." Sandel says, 'Parental love is not contingent on the
talents and attributes a child happens to have. We choose our friends and
spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do
not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most
conscientious parents cannot be wholly responsible for the kind of children
they have. That is why parenthood, more than any other human relationship,
teaches what the theologian William F. May calls the 'openness of the
unbidden.'
"May's
resonant phrase helps us to see that the deepest moral objection to enhancement
lies less in the perfection it seeks than in the human disposition it expresses
and promotes. The problem is not that parents usurp the autonomy of a child
they design. The problem lies in the hubris of the designing parents, in their
drive to master the mystery of birth. Even if this disposition did not make
parent tyrants to their children, it would disfigure the relation between
parent and child, and deprive the parent of the humility and enlarged human
sympathies that an openness to the unbidden can
cultivate.
"To
appreciate children as gifts or blessings is not, of course, to be passive in
the face of illness or disease. Medical intervention to cure or prevent illness
or restore the injured to health does not desecrate nature but honors it.
Healing sickness or injury does not override a child's natural capacities but
permits them to flourish.
"Nor
does the sense of life as a gift mean that parents must shrink from shaping and
directing the development of their child. Just as athletes and artists have an
obligation to cultivate their talents, so parents have an obligation to
cultivate their children, to help them discover and develop their talents and
gifts. As May points out, parents give their children two kinds of love: accepting love and transforming love. Accepting love affirms the being of the child,
whereas transforming love seeks the well-being of the child. Each aspect
corrects the excesses of the other, her writes: 'Attachment becomes too quietistic if it slackens into mere acceptance of the child
as he is.' Parents have a duty to promote their children's excellence.
"These
days, however, overly ambitious parents are prone to get carried away with
transforming love- promoting and demanding all manner of accomplishments from
their children, seeking perfection. 'Parents find it
difficult to maintain an equilibrium between the two
sides of love,' May observes. 'Accepting love, without transforming life,
slides into indulgence and finally neglect. Transforming
love, without accepting love, badgers and finally rejects."[4]
My
generation has been moving steadily in the direction of transforming love with
an edge for quite some time now. Most of us are too invested in our children's
athletic progress; Most of us micro-manage their academic careers. Most of us
structure their lives, week in and week out, summer vacation experiences. There
was a cartoon in the Far Side that featured two elementary kids getting
together for play, both have their palm pilots and one says, 'Next Thursday is
piano and karate, is the following Wednesday good for you?'
Sandel
notes the irony of this development from our youth to the present. As young
people, the generation now 45-60 was all about simply accepting the world,
participating in its grooviness. The two favorite
drugs for that generation were marijuana and LSD that allowed them to merge
with the world in the moment. These were the students of Timothy Leary, who
beckoned us to 'tune in, turn on, and drop out.' At some
point, that generation morphed, like Woody Allen, who once said, "I
don't do mellow well… I get mellow, then I mush, and then I rot."
There
has been no-time for navel gazing for our children… Oh, no, no no… Our children have no un-structured time. It is one
activity to the next to the next. And the most popular drugs for this
generation are hardly recreational or participatory. The most widely prescribed
drugs for our children are Ritalin and Adderal, both designed to improve their concentration and focus, 'not
for checking out, but for buckling down, not for beholding the world and taking
it in but for molding the world and fitting in.'[5]
The
metaphor is a little forced but only a little… The point is that we are already
moving rapidly down the path taking control, down the path that seeks
transformation, that encourages excellence for those we are responsible for
above all else, and that is willing to increase our responsibility in order to
achieve results. It is not a great leap, morally speaking, for the next
generation to run further in the same direction and opt for genetic
enhancements that take the same approach to the next level. We should not be
surprised if we see in our grandchildren have a "one-sided triumph of
willfulness over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over
beholding."[6]
If
they follow our example to its logical conclusion, we may well find ourselves
saying, 'Woah! We didn't mean that.' Spiritually
speaking, we will see in them an atrophied sense of their dependence upon God,
an atrophied sense of their own contingency in the world. After several
generations, it is entirely possible that we will see an atrophied sense of mutual
humanity with those that suffer from genetic diseases.
Up
until this point, Sandel points out, "In a social world that prizes
mastery and control, parenthood is a school for humility. That we care deeply
about our children and yet cannot choose the kind we want teaches
parents to be open to the unbidden. Such openness is a disposition worth
affirming, not only within families but in the wider world as well. It invites us
to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to rein in the impulse to
control."[7] But the
world towards which we are headed is likely to resemble nothing so much as a
genetic gated community.
Indeed,
as Sandel points out, "… the real problem is the explosion… of
responsibility [ever widening domain of responsibility]. As humility gives way,
responsibility expands to daunting proportions. We attribute less to chance and
more to choice. Parents become responsible for choosing or failing to choose the
right traits for their children… One of the blessings of seeing ourselves as creatures of nature, God, or fortune is that we are not
wholly responsible for who we are. The more we become masters of our genetic
endowments, the greater the burden we bear for the talents we have and the way
we perform."[8]
The
spiritual and moral challenges that lay before us are actually considerable. As
a society, we have been singularly gifted with technological prowess that has
opened up nearly miraculous treatments in the past two generations. At the
moment, our technical prowess fast outstrips our spiritual and moral
imagination. What it underscores is the profound importance that spirituality
will actually play in a world where we increasingly have Promethian
ability. As responsibility expands, the fundamental importance of spirituality increases, not decreases.
Ironically, at the juncture where we need spiritual and
moral maturity more than ever, we communicate by our actions that spirituality
a low priority relative to academic achievement, athletic competition and
recreation. The rising generations have less spiritual facility and greater
spiritual challenges at the same time. It is precisely this that historians
will be writing about 300 years from now.
These
are the broad outlines of our Zeitgeist, the Spirit of our times. It is so
close to us and we participate in it so mutually that we are unable to really
see the landscape towards which we are heading for the herd that is running all
around us.
In
the 40's and 50's our culture could not see the depth of the deleterious
effects that racial thinking had on our society and how we would have to change
course dramatically in the decades to come. But we did.
Likewise,
we cannot see from here quest for perfection and our technological
sophistication are changing and expanding the spiritual challenges for the
rising generations but they are. Just when the casual in my generation were
thinking that spirituality would take care of itself, that it was being
superceded, the challenges are actually rising and widening. And it won't be
enough to simply repeat the religious answers of yesterday in the hopes that
they will be enough. We will actually have to help the rising generations come
to new understandings of humility, reverence, contingency, compassion, mercy.
We will have to help them think through the whole notion of limits on human
responsibility.
So
if you are wondering today, if you are wasting your time brining your children
to Church and giving them remedial education
in matters spiritual, because there are days when you wonder if it makes any
difference at home, you are not. And if you are wondering what your mission is
on Monday as you start the new week, remember you are their spiritual guide to
help them develop the capacities of humility, reverence, compassion, and mercy…
It will take all of us, but you have an important mission too, to transform
them in the direction of being broadly humane, spiritually compassionate in a
world of ever expanding control and responsibility. I don't know about you, but
I never thought I would hear that kind of wisdom from Harvard. Amen.
[1] Sandel,
Michael. 'The Case Against Perfection What's Wrong
with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering', The Atlantic Monthly, April, 2004, pp.
51-62.
[2] See p. 52
[3] ibid. p. 59.
[4] Ibid. p. 57.
[5] Ibid. p. 58.
[6] Ibid. p. 60.
[7] Ibid. p. 60.
[8] Ibid.
© 2004
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
