Posted on 11/21/2005 7:56:08 PM PST by NZerFromHK
With a birthrate too low to sustain the Canadian welfare state, how can we not embrace the future post-human race
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Most of the great issues we face today snuck up on us. How many Canadians in 1990 reckoned that by 2005 men would be marrying men at city hall? How many Europeans gave a thought to the Islamification of almost every one of their cities? I've written before about the phenomenon of "creeping sharia"--last year's decision by the Inland Revenue in London to recognize polygamy for the purposes of inheritance tax; the news the other week that police in the Australian state of Victoria have been instructed to "treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits"--i.e., if you're in the habit of beating your wife, it's best not to be Presbyterian. This would seem to deal a severe blow not just to Ahmed's four hapless spouses but also to the concept of equality before the law.
So what's the next big thing that's likely to sneak up on us quietly and incrementally? After creeping sharia, I'd bet on creeping creepiness--the sly elisions on humanity's path to a post-human future. Joel Garreau has just written a fascinating book on the subject called Radical Evolution--about the combined effects of the so-called GRIN technologies: genetics, robotics, information systems and nanotechnology. Thus, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Virginia is currently working on ways to create "better humans"--soldiers who can communicate with each other simply by thought and can regrow damaged body parts.
If you're thinking, "Oh, for God's sake. I've got this month's phone bill to pay and Steyn's boring on about some stuff that's gonna kick in circa 2100," well, not so fast--or, rather, not so slow. As the headline on a National Geographic interview with the author put it, "How Weird? How Soon?" "We're talking about the next 10 or 20 years," says Garreau. "This is going to happen on our watch." DARPA's previous far-fetched ideas include the Arpanet--now known as the Internet--and the Predator, the unmanned drone that tracked and killed a group of al Qaeda bigwigs driving their SUV through the Yemen desert.
Yet it seems to me transformative innovation is not so much technological as social. For example, we have the technology to go to the moon, but nobody wants to, so the space program languishes. By contrast, packaged as part of the broader social context of feminism, the sexual revolution and the consequent upending of traditional perspectives on human reproduction, the gruesome innovation of partial-birth abortion (i.e., infanticide) slid smoothly down the slipway and into our lives. That same route will make GRIN technology part of our world in the next 10 years.
Take human cloning. It's all but certain that within a decade it will be available and affordable. Not in Trois-Rivières, nor even in Seoul, where the first cloned dog made his debut a few weeks back, but surely in some jurisdiction somewhere or other. Will there be clients anxious to take advantage of it? Undoubtedly. Not just billionaire kooks, but also the likes of Barrie and Tony, a couple from Chelmsford in southern England. They'd been trying for a baby for some time, but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because they're both men. So in 1999 they bought four eggs from one woman, co-mingled their sperm in a beaker and shipped it to a second woman in the United States who for two-hundred grand managed to find a rare nine-month vacancy in her fallopian timeshare. The resulting twins were born in California and, in a landmark court decision, Barrie and Tony became the first couple to both be named as father on the birth certificate, though neither mother rated a credit. Nor the turkey baster.
That would seem to be in defiance of what we used quaintly to call "the facts of life." But who cares about biology? As Hester Lessard, the eminently eminent law professor at the University of Victoria, has argued, "biological" concepts of parenthood are "an increasingly fictional creation narrative" that "legitimates a heterosexual view of the family." And we wouldn't want that, would we? Which is why earlier this year the Province of Ontario passed Bill 171 abolishing the words "husband," "wife," "widow," "widower," "man" and "woman" from its laws--and not just the words but the very concept of gender.
So, given that the law has in effect done away with biology, what's the big deal about cloning? The first human clone will enter the world in a clinic in Morocco or Mexico or some such, and maybe she won't show up in Toronto or San Francisco until she's 18 and applies for a driver's licence. Or maybe her "parent" will bring her in when she's six and attempt to enroll her in grade school. But, whenever it is, one thing we can agree on: a court manned (whoops) by the likes of Claire L'Heureux-Dubé will balk at declaring such a person officially non-human. They will recognize her as a legal human being on the grounds that that's what the jurisdiction in which her laboratory is located in recognizes her as--just as the British authorities recognized the California court's decision on Barrie and Tony.
A few years back, after her ruling striking down Ontario's definition of a spouse as a member of the opposite sex, Madame L'Heureux-Dubé flew on to London to join her chum Michael Kirby, Australia's most senior gay judge, at an international gay-rights conference. Mr. Justice Kirby and Her Ladyship are the Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor of the activist-judge jet set, gaily cartwheeling across the hot-button issues of the day. As she told the crowd, she would continue to fight against "a general failure in the political process to recognize the rights of lesbians and gays." A church group objecting to being forced to conduct same-sex marriages might wonder if they'd get an impartial hearing from such a judge, but, as Madame L'Heureux-Dubé declared to loud applause, "You can call it partiality. I call it human."
Barrie and Tony have an understandably "human" urge to breed their own children without having to buy eggs and rent wombs and introduce grubby commercial transactions into what would otherwise be a romantic evening with a candlelit dinner and Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi followed by a trip to the clone clinic. Would Her Ladyship deny them their wish? Or would she do the "human" thing and extend human rights to their non-human progeny? Michael Kirby is presently the bioethics adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and has already said, "Detailed regulation is not possible and probably not desirable. This is not defeatism or resignation. It is realism."
But that would merely be the gay tip of a much broader iceberg. One reason why I audibly groaned at the public announcement of our new Governor General was because its transparent modishness was so squaresville. Even if one believed that the perfect society was one comprised eternally of first-generation immigrants, it's simply unsustainable. The world is running short of emigrants to be our immigrants. Pace Paul Martin's multiculti platitudes, the modern Euro-Canadian welfare state needs immigrants not to "celebrate diversity" but because of its shrivelled birthrates. And once the immigrants run out, it'll be back to the old drawing board. And, given that their citizens will be worsening the already calamitous demographic distortion by using GRIN technologies to extend their lives into the nineties and beyond, the state will also find such technology too seductive to resist. In other words, just as abortion and low birthrates were advanced by the demand for women to enter the workforce in massive numbers, so genetic evolution will be advanced by the demand not just for men, women, immigrants but anything to enter the workforce and save the progressive social-democratic state from total collapse.
Canada won't be the first. But Japan, the most geriatric society on earth, might well be. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo's Gakugei University calls the first "low birth-rate recession." So what's the easier response for Japanese and European governments? Weaning their pampered populations off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving some local entrepreneur the licence to create a new subordinate worker class?
Meanwhile, the ever more elderly Japanese and Europeans and Canadians will go on--and on and on, like the joke about the gnarled old rustic and the axe he's had for 70 years: he's replaced the blade seven times and the handle four times, but it's still the same old trusty axe. We will have achieved man's victory over death, not in the sense our ancestors meant it--the assurance of eternal life in the unseen world--but in the here and now. Which is what it's all about, isn't it? An eternal present tense.
Think I'm kidding? Compare the suspicion and denigration of genetically modified foods to what's mostly either enthusiasm for or indifference to genetically modified people. Mess with our vegetables, we'll burn down your factory. Mess with us, and we pass you our credit card. And by the time we wonder whether it was all such a smart idea it'll be the clones who have the Platinum Visa cards.
Ping!
In a two child family society, there is no one to look after grandma (therein lies, I think, the fundamental idiocy of libertarianism which thinks you can have a small government without a traditional religious culture creating big families that can nurture each other through sickness and old age). No one to visit her, no one to clean her diapers. Robotics is about that too.
Indeed, in a small family culture it is easy to end up lonely. To become the single woman at 45 alone with her cat, etc.
Nietzsche's warning about the death of God leading to the death of humanity is very real. Only the Last Men find such a future worth living.
Cloned Canadians ~ now that's a nightmare!
There IS another potential solution for countries with birth rates below 2 per female: Convert the nation to the LSD church (Mormanism) and use modern science to change the basic sex ratio from the normal 1 - 1 to something like 1 - 8 or 1 - 10. At that rate, 1.2 or 1.3 children per female would be more than enough to replenish the population.
"That would seem to be in defiance of what we used quaintly to call "the facts of life." But who cares about biology? As Hester Lessard, the eminently eminent law professor at the University of Victoria, has argued, "biological" concepts of parenthood are "an increasingly fictional creation narrative" that "legitimates a heterosexual view of the family." And we wouldn't want that, would we? Which is why earlier this year the Province of Ontario passed Bill 171 abolishing the ords "husband," "wife," "widow," "widower," "man" and "woman" from its laws--and not just the words but the very concept of gender."
!!!
Tomorrow's Brave New World. Insanity!
Government and Courts ABOLISH WORDS, THE VERY CONCEPTS?
bttt
Chimps, gorillas and orangutans, genetically engineered to make them smart enough to understand commands. Especially the word, "No!"
They'll protect us from the clones, too.
And, naturally, since each man would be required to provide such prodigious... service... along these lines, the women would have to be chosen for their sexual characteristics which would have to be of a high stimulating nature.
If I made a clone of myself, I wouldn't have my clone do mundane things, like rake the leaves, or wash my (our?) car. Instead- I'd fight my clones to the death, and the strongest and wiliest of us would become me.
Who can say I haven't done this already?
Hmm?
Damn. Beat me to it.
"A society with superabundance of such giants, if it is managed properly, might be able to progress beyond our wildest dreams"
might as well mass suicide now then.......how do you manage a michael angelo?...Jefferson...Churchill...Mozart...ummm, Muhammed Ali?....can't micro-manage Genius.
"Not just billionaire kooks, but also the likes of Barrie and Tony, a couple from Chelmsford in southern England. They'd been trying for a baby for some time, but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because they're both men."
LOL
Transhumanism (what Steyn refers to as GRIN) should be embraced, not shunned. I do not think we're going to grow worker-clones in a laboratory to support an aging populace.
Steyn's argument is akin to saying that medical technology should never have progressed pass the 40s, because who knows what maliciousness will come of it?
ping
Sounds like you did too much LDS as a youngster.
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