Picking up the velocity here…

I’ve been on hiatus, huh?

Lots going on, really. We moved 400 miles southward on August 1 (note: I arrived with a 16′ truck-full of belongings, and, ah… no where to put it). We ended up down the street from Biola, where we’re attending grad school at Talbot School of Theology. Lani and I are both enrolled in the MA in Philosophy.

We miss people and places in the Bay Area, but overall, we are very happy with this life change. We’re both flourishing in the academic environment.

Lani’s put on about 10 pounds recently… but it’s mostly because there’s a living human being inside of her now. See my recent “Ultra” post. Got another one coming too.

I’ve got a lot on my mind, what with all of these changes, and hope to be posting a good deal more frequently…

Specifically, I’m hoping for a couple new series:

1. What I’m Reading: I’ve always wanted to process the stuff that I read up here, just to put thoughts to… ahh… not paper, but… something like it… megabytes? So philosophy, theology, literature or otherwise, I’m looking forward to doing that.

2. Thoughts on the Child: I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts on fatherhood and early human life over the past two years. Some things that nag me way to much to leave unsaid.

Here’s to picking up the velocity once again…

Consuming Children: Humanity = Artifact

See links: The CBC Network, Secondhand Smoke, The Human Future

Is it possible to derive a should from a can? That is, does the fact that we can do something ever imply that we should do it? There are plenty of things that are within your power to do right now—maybe you’ve been thinking this yourself!—but should you do it?

On September 18, I attended a debate in which this question is central. The topic: “Designer Babies: The Morality of Pursuing Perfection.” The first time I heard the phrase “designer babies,” my mind flashed to the terror of toddler pageants: overly made-up girls, forced into adulthood by parents who want to show off their “good stock.” Totally creepy, and not far off the same path: the issue here is the making of our children in our own image. At this debate in particular, we were faced with genetic technology and its proposed use to determine what and how and who our children will be.

The match-up for this event: Wesley Smith, the CBC’s own consultant, arguing that genetically designing progeny is wrong, and Gregory Stock, CEO of Signum Biosciences and former director of UCLA Medical School’s Program on Medicine, Technology and Society, defending the practice of designing babies.

It was a lively debate, on a tough, complex issue. Here I can only offer a brief (and hopefully fair) representation of both views, and then I’ll offer some of my own thoughts.

Stock’s Position
Stock, a biophysicist, claims that science is ever-revealing the very substance of humanity (e.g., mapping the human genome). He applauds human rational-technical control of the world, and infers that, as a part of the world, we humans will (and should) turn to ourselves, to recreate humanity, just as we do our environment. We’re human, we’re technological; it’s what we do, it’s our destiny.(1) Through a course of scientific trial and error, we eventually arrive at good ends. This being the case, he welcomes such fashioning and designing of progeny, as a natural step in our evolutionary history. We already “sculpt our minds and bodies using exercise, drugs, and surgery, [and] tomorrow we will also use the tools that biotechnology provides.(2) As a leader in his field, he encounters many well-meaning and responsible parents, and he resoundingly insists, “why not?”

Smith’s Position
Smith finds the notion of genetic engineering of progeny wrong and ridiculously flawed, and offers several lines of argument to support his position: research and procedures will be extremely expensive; it’s full of hubris (pride) and hedonism (self-seeking pleasure, on the parts of parents); it reinterprets procreation as a form of solipsism (everything exists for me); the practice is literally eugenic in denying equality to all, placing higher value on the “fit”; it fails to take into account the freedom, individuality and personal rights of the designed child; and it’s a utopian ideal, which, as history shows, is ultimately oppressive.

Taking Stock of Designing Babies
My own position lines up similarly to Smith’s; so I’d like to use the remainder of this article to consider Stock’s position. First, he openly makes positive moral claims regarding the procedures and effects of genetic engineering in human lives. His challenge, then, would be squaring these moral claims with his deterministic evolutionary perspective on human technology—if we have no choice in the matter, if it is truly our destiny, then it “just is.” It is neither right nor wrong; as such, he’s faced with either abandoning his claim that these things are good, or abandoning his evolutionary, deterministic worldview—not an appealing dilemma for him.

Second, it’s difficult to see how Stock can get out of the claim that his views are entirely eugenic. Selecting, modifying or fixing embryos with germinal choice technology by genetic screening and germline engineering (altering cells at an embryo’s blastocyst stage) is clearly an instantiation of eugenics, or “good birth.” And the genetic programming Stock advocates perfectly falls in line with the definition of the term by Sir Francis Galton, who is credited with its coinage: “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”(3)

Abolishing Our Babies, Abolishing Our Selves
These are some seriously high hurdles an advocate of designing babies has to jump. But off in the distance (or is it already before us?), I see a crushing defeater for Stock. We find this line of argument eloquently woven through the addresses of C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. I’m continually haunted by Lewis’ prescient, prophetic commentary on modern human science and its eugenic nature. This is the defeater for any who think that any sort of “good” ends will be achieved for humans by designing humanity:

The man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please… They are… men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean… It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao [Lewis' term for the natural moral law], they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.(4)

It will be the task for Stock and his fellow conditioners to show how humanity can undergo such radical recreation, and yet remain human.

As a father in training (we’re due in February 2010), I have a vested interest in this matter. Of course I want my child to enjoy a fruitful and successful life. What parent doesn’t? But my wife and I need to respect the limits imposed by my child’s rights, good common sense, and plain right and wrong. We need to resist the temptation of conditioning our child to be something that we think is right; the moment we take that step, we cease to regard our child as human—made in God’s image—and in “consuming” our baby-artifact, we abandon our own humanity.
I look forward to welcoming and loving our imperfect, fully human child into the world as he or she is—not as we think our child should be.

So, Who Won?
I know this question is just nagging you to pieces. I’m obviously biased to favor Mr. Smith’s position; he did an excellent job of defending his position. But regardless of who won, a deeper question nags us: As capable as we are with science and technology, do we have the moral character and virtue to take this on rightly, promoting the good of our progeny? An affirmative answer to that question worries me a great deal, and threatens to abolish us completely.

1. Stock, Gregory, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), p. 197
2. Ibid, p. 194.
3. Black, Edwin, War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Avalon, 2003), p. 18.
4. Lewis, C.S., The Abolition of Man (original publication: 1944; HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 60-64.

Ultra

6 weeks

11 weeks

20 weeks

On Easy Connections and Being Someplace

(Nairobi, Kenya)

Dear reader, hello! And I am in Kenya now. And already have some mixed feelings about how to communicate with the people I want to keep informed while I’m here.

And this is why!

Something feels wrong having travelled for 27 hours to the opposite side of the world, and then immediately “connecting” to the internet from a Nairobi hotel room. The wrongness is in the easiness I think. It’s too easy for our own good. Why? Because it’s tempting to live and act as if I am not gone. But I am. Hence, another little dichotomy/fracture in the attempt to live wholly. How am I supposed to commit to being here as I type this blog which HAS NO PLACE?

Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “being somewhere is better than being anywhere.”

I want to feel like I’m somewhere as remote as the place I really am – I want to feel like there is a painful distance between me and my wife that will be resolved in 13 days.

I’m not sure I can really communicate this idea over a blog that will be instantaneously available in just a few minutes. A tension of intentions to be sure (wanting to “reach out” and “connect” and be “close” – rife with spacial metaphor, eh!?).

Oh Whole!, resolve our inconsistencies and fix our fractures. Connect us. Bring us close. Advance us from mere metaphor to reality.

Is this medium effective for such a plea? Do You hear and respect this message? For it shall self-destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

KenYEAH!

Turning Back the Wheel of Progress

…if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.
- Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

I’ve had my head wrapped in Clive Staples Lewis for the past couple months (as I’ve been teaching this class), and the most notable feature of my study thus far is probably the sort of education he received and delivered. This, by and large, was “Classics” – but it was remarkably thorough in that he studied not just the history and language of Latin or Greek (the definition of “Classics” that I’d learned in school); his course of study applied such a wide range of disciplines to whatever he read. So, of course modern thought was important and fit for study, but the foundation of these modern questions was (and remains to be) found in antiquity. That is, all good and truthful ideas are really just old ideas – found in old books, written by old thinkers, and now (probably at an ever-diminishing rate) only taught by old dinosaurs of teachers (as Lewis might say).

My friend Dan recently recommended Dorothy Sayers’ article “The Lost Tools of Learning” – it’s really her set of suggestions about how to teach young people – from childhood to adolescence. She laments keeping kids in school too long, thus extending that adolescence; she prescribes a Scholastic model, based on Medieval practices (yes, there was a lively educational institution in those “Dark Ages”). You should learn Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric all by 16.

And honestly, the “Scholastic School of Sayers” is something I would have shuddered at as a kid. But now the only shuddering I’m doing is based on the fact that I have read only too little of ancient thought and history. Better late than never, or so they say.

So, how does a 26-year-old catch up? Or a 30 something or older, for that matter? Its tough advice, since the learning curve is so steep – but I think we need to take Lewis’ advice for ourselves and READ OLD BOOKS, and we need to take Sayers’ advice for our children and TURN BACK THE WHEEL.

Aching for the dear reader’s thoughts on this.

Another notch in the single-tasker’s belt

(I realized this morning that many of my own words, on this blog at least, are reactions to the words and thoughts of others. No man is an island.)

From “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration” was in the NYT today. This was a very interesting article to me, for a few reasons.

1. This is more support for a lifestyle of single-tasking.

2. The problem is clearly defined, and requires little external evidence; everyone feels unproductive in this fast-paced world of progress and production. Everyone. Problem defined: we can’t pay attenti… hmm. I’m hungry. I need to pay some bills too. And get gas. No not that kind of gas, got plenty of that. I need to finish my Lewis lecture, and get immunizations, and… oh, blog.

3. The article comes so close to suggesting what I think is the only solution: clear your life; change your attitude toward things; reevaluate; reset; develop the virtue of contemplation (thinking long and lovingly about X); have a disposition of focus; today’s troubles are enough; the moment’s troubles are enough.

4. But it doesn’t suggest that. It shouts out to “meditation” but other than that, expects that technology (externalities) are able to fix us, without a meaningful change from within. Put in ear plugs; attach “a frikkin’ laserbeam to your head” to neurologically change your brain to pay attention. I wish I was kidding, but this is how twacked we’ve gotten. That’s transhumanism – this device would take us one step closer to merging into an unholy chimera of man and machine. Just wait for the suggestion of an implant.

5. Cool shout outs to William James and Milton, but I’m not sure if the context works to apply their thoughts. (I’ve never read either of those quotes though…)

6. I am (regardless of my blogbashings) supremely guilty of multi-tasking. But when I can sit and focus for a large block of time (the book/article suggests 90 minutes, but I’m thinking more like 2-4 hours) on the top priorities of my professional, vocational life… Oh! The happy state! I feel whole. I feel united.

Theoretical notch or not, this doesn’t change the fact that we are a culture of divided individuals. Say what you will about “connection” or “unity” with others… we need wholeness and unity within ourselves. (And something tells me that the two are more intimately related than I already think.)

Alas! Modernity! Part 2 of 2 (The Poem)

Aye! Modernity! Realize what no machine could do: feel the rebuke, know the shame! How does mythopoeia translate to zeros and ones?

And the Guide sang:

Iron will eat the world’s old beauty up.
Girder and grid and gantry will arise,
Iron forest of engines will arise,
Criss-cross of iron crotchet. For your eyes
No green or growth. Over all, the skies
Scribbled from end to end with boasts and lies.
(When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou
Saw’st beyond death the resurrection of the dead.)

Clamour shall clean put out the voice of wisdom,
The printing-presses with their clapping wings,
Fouling your nourishment. Harpy wings,
Filling your minds all day with foolish things,
Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings
Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.
(When Israel descended into Egypt, Thou
Dist purpose both the bondage and the coming out._

Tis new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
And fools crying, Because it has begun
It will continue as it has begun!
The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
Faster for ever. The old age is done,
We have new lights and see without the sun.
(Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the denaturalization of the earth, the dethroning of wisdom, and the love of uninhibited progress – with an eye to redeeming purpose beyond the toil

Alas! Modernity! Part 1 of 2 (The Prose)

Oh, blessed and damned Machine Age! Hearken! You’ve heard of your futility before. I merely – pray not vainly – repeat:

‘There must be a good side somewhere to this revolution,’ said Vertue. ‘It is too solid – it looks to lasting – to be a mere evil…”

The Guide laughed. ‘You are falling into their own error,’ he said. ‘The change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught – an inability to disbelieve advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. There next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves – though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do.

‘It is the same with all their machines. Their labor-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change.

‘And as for permanence – consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.’

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the futile shift from classical to scientific education

Tasty, iddn’t it? Part 2 coming soon.

‘Being dead’ is so last season!

Exactly.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Dear Reader, dear,
I’m hearing some stuff about the end of the university, or, maybe it’s the beginning… ? Well, I don’t want either. And I’m just starting up again, so give me a break! (If I haven’t told you yet, we decided, and we’re both enrolling in Talbot’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics MA program.)

I’m talkin’ about stuff like this and this. I’m sure there’s more of it, too. We now live among a culture and people which, in this era, LOVE to pronounce the death and end of things. ‘God is dead!’ ‘Blogging is dead!’ ‘Eating food is dead!’ ‘Sleeping is so last season!’ I think this is reflective of the temptation of immediacy – to pick up and speed along. Maybe there’s even some “chronological snobbery” built into that (this “snobbery” is a term of C.S. Lewis, borrowed from fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield).

But the concerns about humanities departments (philosophy, religion, theology, english, etc.) “dying” don’t worry me. I’m not worried about going back to school. In fact, I’m more sure about this than LOTS of other decisions in my 26-year life. I’ll continue to pursue a patient spiritual, intellectual, social and academic lifestyle; and the foundation for this patience is the inherent value of thinking and contemplating (v. “to think long and lovingly” – thanks Dave Evans for that) about the world and everything, physical and non-, in it.

If there is any worry for anyone at all, the source must be the reigning (and thoroughly unwelcome, I say) pragmatism of all generations. Earlier in my life I would have said that cultural pragmatism (the kind that suggests going to college merely for a job, to make money) is a generational thing. Silly baby-boomers. But I’m starting to think it’s not generational. Worry comes in all shapes and sizes and ages and so does the pragmatism that dons the crown deep below the surface of that worry.

So I’m rebelling. I’m going to actually enjoy grad school, and I’m going to enjoy the debt we shall incur and the job scarcity and low salaries that follow from a life of academics. I’m hoping to learn a little more about the Classic, undying value for the intellectual life of mind, heart and soul, and what that means for the details of my life.

It’s gotta be a media thing – ironically enough, since ‘News is dead!” is not an uncommon hidden meaning in headlines these days. In fact, how’s “News is old!” for the next NYT headline? Double irony!!

So, media giants! you soothsayers of cultural fate! Will anything else be dead tomorrow? Pragmatists! you worrisome lot! Is anything else regrettably last season?

More importantly, and for the rest of us, is anything alive today? is anything eternal today?