Redefining ‘Good Enough’
Re “Keep Us Human,” Commentary, April 14: Bill McKibben is dead wrong. The legitimate purpose of genetic engineering is not to turn out clones of Einstein, who couldn’t balance his checkbook. Its purpose is to produce, over several generations, a great majority of people who are, by a goodly margin, smarter, stronger and healthier than their forebears and are capable of leading successively fuller, happier lives -- human lives.
McKibben says that in our limits we find meaning. What meaning do the Earth’s 6 billion souls find in their three- to four-score years, half of them spent in unrewarding and poorly paid labor, capped by descent into crippling disease and senile dementia? For genetically more robust people there will be limits, but the kind of limits on the horizon of someone who can earn $50 per hour, not the much closer and more dismaying limits that incarcerate a person who can earn no more than minimum wage. And of someone who can have several careers, at least some of which can satisfy, consummated by an old age with body and mind intact.
James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discoveries will not result in perfection or the drastic redesign of human beings and won’t make us less human; but the implications of these discoveries face us as a mandate to use them to our benefit, the risks notwithstanding. If we don’t take up the challenge, humans will not be able to deal with their ever-growing demographic, epidemiological and economic problems in any way that is humane. A species smart enough to discover the double helix should be wise enough to know that it is far, far from good enough!
Robert P. Sechler
Cypress
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McKibben writes that “monstrous” plans (genetic engineering) would “replace the fate and the free will that always have been at the center of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots.”
It is difficult to understand how one’s fate (assuming such a program of inevitability) would be affected by, let’s say, genetically improving the cortical capacity of a human brain, or in what part of the process the “free will” is expected to be extracted. It seems to me that whatever adjustments are made to improve the curve, if you will, of human intelligence, potential, health, etc., the essential core of humanity endures -- albeit, perhaps, in a more fertile environment.
Mason C. Lewis
Manhattan Beach
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McKibben presents his thesis that being human is “enough,” which it is, given health and intelligence. But he fears the costs of biological engineering, such as “catalog children,” though in the cultural sense they are already the norm. He fears the loss of free will, which is already subject to constraint. He says, “An eternal robot might be nifty, but it wouldn’t be human.”
Humanity, too, may be nifty, but a human deficiency is no less deficient for all its humanity. What McKibben calls “[a] species smart enough to discover the double helix” is simultaneously stupid enough to commit any number of atrocities. And giving our whole species credit for such intelligence is pathologically optimistic, seeing the glass not as 99% empty but as 1% full.
McKibben claims, “We need to accept certain imperfections in ourselves in return for certain satisfactions.” Recognizing the subjectivity of satisfaction, all are welcome to such rationalizations and to whatever “satisfaction” they may derive from stupidity, disease and death. But if he values free will so much, then he will realize the folly of deciding for others the satisfaction they should experience from the acceptance or rejection of particular imperfections.
“What we need are the equivalents of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer,” he says, seeking sources of wisdom. Given sufficient longevity, the real ones would still be among us, making their equivalents unnecessary.
Jim Johnson
Whittier
