MORE FALLOUT FROM THE NOORY SHOW
MARCH 28, 2011. Emails about my appearance on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, last Thursday, keep coming in. Many of the questions and comments are on the subject of “designing humans.”
So I thought I’d make a few additional comments:
What about researchers who claim there are genes that monitor factors like talent, like IQ, like which emotions predominate, and so on?
Speculation. It hasn’t been proved. It tends to be hype. It’s wishful thinking right now.
There’s certainly an interest in redesigning humans—undergoing medical procedures that alter genetic structure in some way, in order to produce “a more advanced human being.”
There are very serious questions about whether that’s really possible in any significant way. But if it is, the people who control it will promote their own vision of what a human should be. Suppose, for example, they could engineer a fetus so the child experiences no ups and downs of feeling?
The child is neutral. Entirely goal-driven. Performs like a machine.
This would be an elite program. Run by people who are obsessed by end results. So they would favor a designing operation that created humans in their own image.
In purely commercial terms, parents would want to choose which genes to give their children, for certain “improvements.”
In that case, parents would be the ones creating their children in their own image. But to take this further, what we’re talking about here is synthetic creation. There is no guarantee that the outcome of genetic tinkering would produce something authentic. It’s like a chair factory. You set up machines in an assembly line, so you can spit out ten thousand chairs that look exactly alike, right? That’s what you do in manufacturing. And when you see a chair like that, you immediately recognize that it’s missing something. It’s not the same thing as a chair that was made by hand.
We’re not taking about chairs. And that’s exactly the problem. A human being is involved with desire and struggle and work to find a better existence. What happens if you surgically cut that line? What happens if you remove that whole road? What’s left? How much passion, for example, is left? And if there isn’t any, what sort of person do you have? These somewhat subtle questions aren’t part of the thinking about genetic re-programming. They’re considered irrelevant.
Take an analogy from painting. A certain kind of painter will completely sidestep the richness and depth of his potential work. Instead, he’ll give you “a happy, happy face” that’s a shallow cartoon of existence. He’ll give you a sad face with big glossy eyes, and that’s supposed to make you feel sad and nostalgic. Now transfer that attitude to genetic designers. What sort of human being would they create? I’m not so much talking about the individual traits as the dimensionality of those traits. They could very well come up with a short-cut type of human. A simulation of a human. Instead of the genetically enhanced human thinking A,B,C,D,E,F,G, he thinks A,G. It’s simpler. It’s faster. But it has no BODY to it. It’s just a kind of short circuit. And it’s not really smarter. It’s mechanical. The enhanced person doesn’t sense or feel meaning.
There’s no triumph.
There’s no impulse of passion to seek and find further frontiers. It’s a cartoon. The society is heading in that general direction already: Display what are supposed to be the outward signs of success and you have success. Of course, that’s insane. That means nothing. That’s the fallacy of so-called positive thinking. You develop a shorthand way of expressing what you want, and you hope that the affirmation will get you there. But where does it get you? You’re trying to compress life down to childish formulas. Your own thinking suffers in the process.
I’ve spoken with genetics researchers. I’ve found a few who are genuinely troubled about where this “re-designing” trend is going. The others are people I wouldn’t hire to make curtains for my windows. They’re super-enthusiastic, but they lack something in themselves. They want to do reductions. They want to design a future that is much simpler. Sell a gene, buy a gene. They really believe in that. You want to have greater sexual drive? Buy Gene ABC. They’re stunted people.
Then there’s the Mozart myth.
Yes, they like to bring that up. Here was a kid who suddenly could play the violin and read a musical score with no training, and then he went on to compose so many works, with seemingly no effort. Wouldn’t you want to have a child like that? Well, I happen to prefer Vivaldi. But now, these days, if you could insert a gene into a fetus and he could, at age ten, play ten different consecutive chords on a guitar without falling over, some parents would call that genius. So the culture itself and the genetic designers have common ground. That’s not a good sign. That’s a Disney cartoon standing in for real life.
JON RAPPOPORT
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