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"I also learned gradually that what I thought had been the socialism of my home was, in fact, a secularized version of prophetic Judaism. It was the prophets without the Law. This was true for my parents' whole generation. Many of these people who fell for Marxism did so, I think, out of a longing for justice and a belief that one didn't have to wait for the messianic age, one could build it here and now."

Consider this quote an innoculation.

Brave New World will never happen. You'd realize that if you actually read the book. It would require a war that nearly exterminates the entire human species to shock the public into supporting anything that even smells like that kind of government. With communism, on paper people had the belief that they would have personal freedom. With a genetic slave state, they would be created for one purpose only. People will only enhance themselves.

It's a short step from the belief that "every child should be a wanted child," the slogan that defends abortion, to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants and that if the child doesn't measure up to our wants, we go to genetic engineering to improve him . . . to get the features we want, in the perfect product

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I think the technical is not just the machinery. The technical is at bottom a disposition to all of life. Jacques Ellul, I think, had it right. It is fundamentally a mentality that formulates all of life's questions as problems, and problems demand solutions, not a quest or longing for answers. This technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good, but instead is trying to solve various kinds of problems so we can go on to the next problem.

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He does have many great things to say but also gives the game away with this:

The net effect of this approach has so often been that the ethicists wring their hands as they confront the dilemmas raised by the scientists, but ultimately they pronounce blessings on whatever it is the scientists want to do.

whatever it is the scientists want to do.

Or politicians ... he blesses Bush's decision, after all.

The Politics of Stem Cells

Thanks very much for the flag.

By the way, the neuroscience area, now absolutely in its infancy, is, I think, much more important than genetics. Genetics offers only crude and indirect control over the activities that really make us human, but the powers coming from the neurosciences will go directly to work on the brain and changes in the mind will follow. And we know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 years, 50 years and so on.

So, at the moment, we have on one side scientists with prestige, knowledge and power backed by powerful economic interests. And on the other side there are those of us equipped only with our ability to raise hard questions about human values. How many divisions does the pope have? In this discussion, not very many.

The former hurrying toward tyranny the likes of which have been heretofore impossible (and conceived of only by a few), and one half of the latter struggling bitterly with the latter over which fork in the road to take.

Thanks for the post. Kass, from the article:

The Greek word bios didn't simply mean life in the sense of animal life. Bios was a human life, the human life that is lived humanly. It finds its place really in the word biography, the writing of a human life. Biology meaning the science of all life is a late notion.

Here lurks the major divide. The bio-sciences cannot be merely a science of matter, or even the highly complex motion of matter, if there is going to be any authentic bio-ethics. This late notion Kass speaks of is, I think, while posing as the science of all ife, the abstraction of these sciences from the context of life which gives rise to them. As long we consider ethics legitimate only apart from that context, the human part of life will be have to suffer more and more.