“Train to Huxley's Dehumanized Brave New World has Already Left the Station”

LifeSiteNews ^ | 11/7/07 | Hilary White

[wagglebee]

NEW YORK, November 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The meaning of human nature itself is under threat from a new philosophy of “soul-less scientism” that will undermine “our own self-understanding as human beings” and reduces the aspirations of mankind to the purely material realm. This new philosophy outstrips the danger posed by the actual techniques and technologies of modern biomedical science, said Dr. Leon Kass, speaking to a New York audience in October.
 
“Scientific ideas and discoveries” he said, “are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity.”
 
In a speech to the Manhattan Institute last month, Dr. Kass, one of the most prominent public intellectuals dealing with bioethical issues, also pointed out that in many cases, these technical achievements are being used “for purposes beyond therapy, and may soon be used to transform human nature itself.”
 
“The Pill. In vitro fertilization. Surrogate wombs. Cloning. Genetic engineering. Organ swapping. Mechanical spare parts. Performance--enhancing drugs. Computer implants into brains. Ritalin for the young, Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone. Virtually unnoticed, the train to Huxley's dehumanized Brave New World has already left the station,” Kass said.
 
But even these dehumanizing technological instruments are not as great a threat as the philosophy driving most of the biomedical research community. Dire as some of these issues are, he said, they point to a deeper, underlying “philosophical challenge: one that threatens how we think about who and what we are.”
 
Dr. Kass researches bioethics, ethics, philosophy, marriage, family, and social mores. He is a former chairman and member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and was instrumental in helping President Bush develop his policies restricting embryonic research and cloning. On October 18, he gave the annual Wriston Lecture, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a public policy think tank that hosts forums in New York City and Washington, DC for policy makers, business people, researchers and journalists on prominent contemporary issues.
 
He identifies a “quasi-religious faith” that he calls “soul-less scientism” a materialist philosophy that that “believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life.”
 
Kass clearly identifies this philosophy as a “threat to our humanity”, saying it proposes to provide a “purely scientific” explanation of “human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God.”
 
The stakes, Kass warned, are high. “All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us — must understand that their own humanity is on the line.”
 
To counter this threat, Kass recommends the view of humanity found in the Bible, particularly its account of creation that he says, “offers a profound teaching on human nature” and “nourish[es] the soul's deep longings for answers” to humanity’s great questions. He notes that the biblical account of creation that “locates that teaching in relation to the deepest human longings and concerns” is unsurprisingly the “chief target” of the proponents of the anti-human soul-less scientism.
 
Kass has defended the Bible’s version of creation, in a way similar to the teaching of the Catholic Church, saying that it in no way conflicts with the findings of modern science. He says it presents not a “freestanding, historical or scientific account” of how life began, areas that are properly the purview of the natural sciences, but an “awe-inspiring prelude to a lengthy and comprehensive teaching about how we are to live”. The creation account provides us with a starting point to help human beings “make sense of their world and their task within it.”
 
While not entirely pro-life, Kass’ work discussing and developing a humanistic answer to modernity’s nihilistic philosophies has been praised by pro-life advocates as a genuine and much needed contribution to the issues. And he has not hesitated to criticise the intellectual vacuity of most modern secular bioethics.
 
Kass warned that the result of the new philosophy of “soul-less scientism” that seeks to reduce all questions of human life to the material, is “more dehumanizing” than any of the actual technologies. It presents “the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.”
 
Read the entire lecture:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/wl2007.htm
 
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Dr. Leon Kass An Exceptionally Principled Scientist
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2001/aug/01081605.html
 
AEI Interview With Bush's Bioethics Council Head Leon Kass
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/jun/06061310.html  

[wagglebee]

The stakes, Kass warned, are high. “All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us — must understand that their own humanity is on the line.”

Unfortunately, many WON'T understand until it is too late.

[wagglebee]

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[wagglebee]

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[RightWhale]

Most high schoolers who were assigned to read BNW in 1950 did not like the story. Most high schoolers who are assigned to read BNW now like the story. This as much as anything indicates the success of the Liberal program.

[Eyes Unclouded]

When we discussed it in 2004 in AP English many people were jealous of the society that was portrayed. Everyone has their place no discontent many drugs and free sex for all. (Of course they would be alphas.)

[E. Cartman]

Unfortunately, many WON'T understand until it is too late.

Ironically, GW Bush's precious "new world order" will be highly instrumental in the dehumanization of the race. The only real hope for humanity is for the people's of the world to maintain their own sovereignity, maintaining a degree of federalism as Baroness Thatcher has been advocating. The uniformity and one-happy-world crap sicken me coming from the mandarins of Wall Street as much as it does coming from the Marxists in academia's ivory towers.

Government closest to home is always the best.

[Paladin2]

Every time I hear folks promoting gov't research on embryonic stem cells, I think of BNW.

Given that an embryo's DNA is quite different from anyone who might be treated with same, I'm wondering what there is to it beyond human cloning. Personalized gene therapy would seem best done using the patient's own cells (DNA).

[Quix]

yup

left station at least as early as 1965

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Federalism. The Founders had it figured out. Pity we have lost our way.

[Tanniker Smith]

I don't remember much about the book -- except kids being taught to have sex young, and one kid crying because he didn't want to have carefree sex. Okay that was only one scene but I remember it from high school, so what does that say about how powerful the scene was.

That, and "Epsilon Semi-Moron".

[Clint Williams]

The only real hope for humanity is for the people's of the world to maintain their own sovereignity,

Yah, but when the "people's" are so ignorant of the basics of their childhood language, I don't have much hope. For several decades now, American children have largely been deprived of the essentials former generations thought their children needed to learn in order to be good Americans.

The America that some of us remember is dead and gone. Enjoy what you have while you still have it, because you won't have it for long.

[jobim]

Have been using this book in World Lit for 4 years, and it speaks with chilling accuracy to students of the world they know is emerging. They feel it in their bones.

[Das Outsider]

“The Pill. In vitro fertilization. Surrogate wombs. Cloning. Genetic engineering. Organ swapping. Mechanical spare parts. Performance--enhancing drugs. Computer implants into brains. Ritalin for the young, Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone. Virtually unnoticed, the train to Huxley's dehumanized Brave New World has already left the station,” Kass said.

But in a different way than Huxley imagined in the late 1920s and early '30s. Much of "Brave New World" has already become reality, though Alduous Huxley was himself the godfather of the psychedelic movement and secularism carte blanche. Perhaps he was what we would call prescient.

He might have hit upon one of the few things that the later hippie movement had right: resistance against a materialistic, mechanistic, and media narcotized culture--although Huxley himself advocated the use of psychotropic drugs. But following Huxley's line of reasoning, "reality" might drive one to get off of the hallucinogens and tune back in, only to find that the open society of yesteryear created the suicidal society of America, 2007.

All things considered, we're living in the hell that pre-WWII writers considered only in their wildest flights of fancy and imagination.

[cpforlife.org]

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[Pinkbell]

I’m definitely going to have to read Brave New World.

[8mmMauser]

Pinged from Terri Dailies

8mm

[Tribune7]

Dr. Kass is a brilliant man.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Every person endowed with reason knows that you can't use something rightly or intelligently unless you know what it's for. And that's the larger issue: what is human life "for"? If it's just for eating eclairs, getting high, having orgasms and functioning frictionlessly in society, then welcome, welcome Brave New World.

But if the human being is oriented in his mind and heart to seek and desire something beyond that, then being an Alpha is quite beside the point, because meaningless pleasure becomes as intolerable as meaningless pain.

The operative terms are not "pleasure" and "pain." The operative term is "meaning."

[Mrs. Don-o]

Interesting brief articles on embryonic cells vs self-donated ("autologous") cells HERE and HERE.

Evidently now even the research scientists themselves see the possibility of developing actual, successful therapies from embryonic stem cells as "remote." This isn't what they were saying back in 2005 when they were all angling for California's $3 BILLION taxpayer-funded embryo stem cell project.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Interesting that of the two most famous dystopias (Brave New World and 1984) it's Huxley's "soft" dictatorship of collectivist mind-numbed subrational pleasure that seems more likely to win out than Orwell's "hard" boot-stomping-your-face dictatorship.

And a really human future? Neither BNW nor 1984? We must struggle for it as if it's possible. Because it's better to die upright than to live prostrate.

I think of this with a real pang in my heart. As to my adolescent sons: I would rather they be dead soldiers than live slackers. That they should just be strong, decent, upright, honest, human, Christian men.