The clones are coming! Lock your doors, hide your wives and children — or, better yet, hold congressional hearings and pass a law.
Angry villagers in academia and on Capitol Hill are crusading for a ban on human cloning — a ban potentially so sweeping that it would wipe out whole areas of genetic research. This crusade has all the signs of full-blown public hysteria: practically everyone says cloning is evil, but no one can give a clear or definite reason why.
Instead, they summon fanciful scenarios borrowed from literature; the current favorites are “Frankenstein” and Aldous Huxley’s turgid eugenics fable “Brave New World.” What I find fascinating about this choice of symbols is that the anti-cloners clamor about the dangers of a “brave new world” — yet none of them recognize that, by implication, they are the defenders of a timid old world.
Consider the odd series of bogeymen they conjure up. Parents, they say, could clone children who are exact copies of themselves — but how is that more shocking than the old-fashioned, inexact copies parents are accustomed to making? Drawing on Huxley’s literary fantasies, they claim that cloning could create a genetic “underclass” — or, alternatively, a genetic “overclass.” In fact, cloning would create genetic copies of people who already exist, whose progeny will be no more or less gifted, and have no more or fewer privileges, than the originals. Or they claim that the existence of genetically identical clones will cause a “loss of individuality” — a fear which, if it were true, ought to make us abhor identical twins. But it isn’t, and we don’t.
These arguments don’t add up. As philosopher Harry Binswanger — a former teacher of mine — points out, none of this can “account for the virtual panic over human cloning.” The opposition to cloning, he concludes, “springs from something primordial, the fear of the unknown, the fear captured in the catch-phrase: ‘We can’t play God.'”
A good representative of these fears is another former professor of mine, University of Chicago medical ethicist Leon Kass. Human procreation, he says, should consist of surrendering to the “lottery of sex,” of “relinquishing our grip” on nature and “saying yes to … the limits of our control.” And that’s what Kass most objects to: human control over nature.
He even opposes in vitro fertilization, the “test-tube” method used to help infertile couples have children. Dr. Kass’s perspective is captured by the distinction he makes between “making” or “manufacturing” a child and “begetting” one. The biblical term is no accident.
The anti-cloning crusade has also been taken up by another religious group: environmentalists. Radical greens fully accept this idea of surrendering passively to Mother Nature — their god — but they take this notion to its logical conclusion. Yes, they say, we should have no cloning — and we should also have no genetic engineering, no animal testing, no modern farming, no roads, no automobiles, no power plants, no computers, no suburban homes.
The shared perspective is a fear of the human mind and a desire to rein in its capabilities. Just as Huxley’s “Brave New World” idealized the life of the few “Savages” remaining on the “Reservation” — so today’s environmentalists glamorize the way of life of early American Indians. And just as Mary Shelley’s mad scientist warned, “learn from my example how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” — so Dr. Kass warns against “the Frankensteinian hubris to create human life and increasingly to control its destiny; man playing at being God.”
But the real danger is in giving up our knowledge. As Dr. Binswanger argues, “A surgeon ‘plays God’ whenever he removes a cancer or an infected appendix rather than letting the patient die. We ‘play God’ anytime we use our intelligence to improve the ‘natural’ course of events. Not to ‘play God’ in this way means to abandon the struggle for human life and submit uncomplainingly to whatever happens.” If cloning can improve human life — by helping couples have children or avoid passing on genetic diseases — it would be immoral not to do it.
I remember once that Dr. Kass began a seminar on Aristotle’s ethics by asking what emotion we regarded as morally more significant: guilt or pride? It is a profound question. Do we regard, as the essence of morality, guilt, humility, and limits on human ambition and achievement — or do we take pride in the ability of the human mind and our power to control our destiny?
During that class, years ago, I was one of the students who answered: “pride.”
