* * *
In reality, it was Darwin who killed off the idea of human nature with his discovery of the evolution of species. Darwin is probably at the origin of the decline of Christianity in the West.
Darwin and his theory of the evolution of species was the first to undermine humanism. The impact of Darwinian evolution can never be sufficiently measured. Never in all their scientific and philosophical depth did the Greeks (who — with Democritus — had a presentiment of the atomic nature of matter, who knew that the Earth was round, who were on the threshold of the Galilean and Copernican revolutions) imagine that man was recent and descended from animal lineages. They had never posed the scientific question of man’s origin, however, instead being content to attribute it to a mythical birth by intervention of the gods.[2] It is not yet widely known, but I maintain that the discovery of the evolution of species (with its very difficult integration by the Church; consider the efforts of Teilhard de Chardin) shook Christianity even to the bosom of its thinking elites. The Darwinian revolution is one of the deep causes of the weakening influence of the Christian magisterium on Western societies, for the following question arises: Starting from what moment can a hominid, descended from primate stock, be declared a man endowed with an immortal soul?
* * *
Technology, that is, the use of synthetics, is very shocking when it comes to sex and reproduction, especially in systems of thought of Christian and monotheistic origin, for one gets the impression that man, through his manipulations, is substituting himself for the Creator and violating nature. This is especially the case, of course, when it comes to ‘touching upon’ sexuality and reproduction. Philosophically, however, human technology (which is part of the domain of culture) is only the prolongation of human nature. So human technological artifact is not a violation of nature but in fact an integral part of it. Nature and culture are two sides of the same coin.[3]
Biotechnologies affecting human reproduction (I shall not even mention here those that concern the animal or vegetable kingdoms), that is, assisted procreation (which concerns 20,000 births per year in France out of slightly more than 800,000), positive eugenics, cloning, genetic therapy, and tomorrow certainly births carried out without pregnancy, obviously constitute a revolution. However, as Stefano Vaj points out in his book Biopolitica: Il nuovo paradigm,[4] the biological revolution which has begun today will not be the first; think of the Neolithic revolution, those of stockbreeding, agriculture, and metallurgy. For Stefano Vaj, the global change caused by biotechnology has been a long time coming, and has ancient roots in the European mentality despite the prohibitions set up by Christianity. He thinks that the disruption provoked by biotechnology ‘will be much more radical and rapid that generally believed’, that ‘bioethical movements are purely reactionary forces’, and that biotechnologies are ‘part of a radical break with today’s dominant values’, that is to say, with the humanist catechism, that bastardised and secularised form of Christianity. On this subject, think of how the reactionary Left raised its shields against genetically modified organisms. Do they suspect that animal and human ‘genetically modified organisms’ will follow those that belong to the realm of horticulture and agriculture?
* * *
It is incorrect to affirm that modern techno-science (especially with its genetic manipulations or nuclear industry) is structurally different from ancient technology. It is not qualitatively but quantitatively different, namely by its enormous effects. The artificial creation of fire (a giant step), the domestication and raising of animals, plant cuttings, ancient medicine and surgery along with methods of contraception and abortion, hallucinogens (including alcohol), selective animal breeding and human eugenics, and the invention of the steam engine rely upon the same procedures as current biotechnology: modifying the course of nature in the service of human desires, but making use of the laws of nature even while seeming to substitute oneself for them. This has been done since the beginning of the Neolithic period (Imperat naturam nisi parendo — ‘nature can only be commanded by obeying it’).[5] Today, since the twentieth century, we have entered a period in which techno-science (especially through the alliance of biotechnology and computer science) might allow a phenomenal acceleration and amplification of ancient tendencies, to the point of our being able to create perhaps traumatising but necessary ruptures. Of course, we are advancing in the fog, and sometimes in pitch darkness, but has man ever been able to predict his own future and foresee the consequences of his own actions for humanity? The destiny of European civilisation bases itself on, as it has always done, on risk-taking, on the wager. To say that there are no risks is false, because techno-science is still advancing more or less amid dangerous obscurity (but so is nature and evolution). However, to deny risk and perpetual innovation is not the part of wisdom either, for immobility and an excess of prudence can also be fatal. Our age has become technophobic, dominated by the senile ‘precautionary principle’ with its plethora of absurdities.[6]
* * *
The most striking contradiction of the partisans of ‘bioethics’, who are inspired by a Judeo-Christian vision of life and man, is that they constantly appeal to natural morality. Man with his techno-science does not have the right to touch Life, and especially Human Life, which is considered the summit, the end point of phylogenesis, of divine creation. (Man being created in the image of God means that to modify him would amount to blasphemously tinkering with divine work.) So it is in the name of ‘respect’ for sacralised and deified Nature that the defenders of bioethics condemn biotechnologies and the genetic manipulation of man, whether they are secular or religious.
Now, this humanism which appeals to Nature is ignorant of the very essence of that Nature. Because, for Nature, human life — individual or even collective — has very little value, no more than any other species. Amid the natural flux, man is called upon to be born, to evolve, and then to disappear. The idea that all human beings have the same (absolute) value is altogether contrary to the work if not to the designs of nature. Indeed, the latter squanders human life by submitting it to all forms of sickness to the point where human science, so much decried, has had to meet the need to survive the trials of nature, and which has succeeded in reducing mortality. Nature not only engineers enormous inequalities between men, but it is generous in the production of the malformed, defectives, monsters, biological impasses, and mass extinctions. One must be truly ignorant or closed-minded to defend the notion of the infinite value of human life by appealing to the natural law. This deification of man is explained by his having been created in the image of God. Well, if such a God exists, it is not at all obvious that he created man in his own image, exclusively upon that bit of dust which is the planet Earth.[7]
* * *
In this sense, biotechnologies (even those which aim at producing ‘supermen’, ‘androids’, ‘mutants’, and other such forms of life) are always integrally part of nature; they even constitute a return to nature insofar as they consider life in the material sense. Will the artifacts produced by future biotechnology be a ‘violation of nature’, a demented twisting of the natural order, an unbearable attack on human dignity? These questions have no answer, and belong to the philosophy of the void rather than the philosophy of life.[8]
It will be understood that this point of view belongs less to an openly non-humanist perspective than a naturalist or superhumanist perspective. In other words, man is considered as an animal like any other, even if he is endowed with self-consciousness. To say ‘man is an animal, but not merely an animal’ (more a slogan than a substantiated position) is an unfalsifiable proposition in Karl Popper’s sense,[9] for what is ‘more than animal’ can never be demonstrated or defined, nor that there does not exist elsewhere in the universe beings far superior to man and which would consider us as animals.
Those opposed to biotechnology (eugenics, genetic engineering, and the like) in the
name of religious or secular morality derived from monotheism rely on a kind of natural order which is morally impermissible to violate. The first contradiction is that the natural order obeys no ethic. It is utterly amoral. The second contradiction is that these defenders of the natural order reject that order as soon as it is applied to society and politics. They claim that ‘all men are brothers’ and that multiethnic societies are viable and desirable (stemming from the belief in miracles); some of them even believe that homosexuality is equivalent to heterosexuality. They have a conception of anthropology which runs contrary to that which is observed of the natural order, with their set-in-stone dogma of equality and the equivalence of the sexes, races, and civilisations. This pseudo-natural order, defended by both Christianity and the ideologies of the Left, is obviously based on anthropocentrism, that is to say, the belief that (deified) Man stands apart from the laws of life which rule all animal and vegetable species.
* * *
We must dialectically reverse this position: if man differs from other living species on the planet, it is not because he has escaped the laws of inequality and evolution, but because he is even more subject to them and may himself intensify and accelerate them, especially through biotechnology, thanks to his overdeveloped neocortex. From this point of view, man — or rather certain men, not ‘humanity’ of course, which is a vague concept — can, by a labour of self-creation and by means of synthetics, not work against nature, but use it to modify himself, to orient his own evolution. This has nothing diabolic or anti-natural about it, no more than does medicine (which cures illnesses), botany (which creates hybrids), or the navigator who uses the wind to travel in the opposite direction. Techno-science does not clash with nature; it utilises nature’s building blocks, trying to substitute its own planning and human will for what it thinks to be natural chance. In any case, even human synthetics are natural, since it comes from nature itself. Life and death, monstrousness and beauty, pain and pleasure, success and failure are all natural.
What is not natural, on the other hand, and is thus pathological, is what certain ideologies preach, namely the equivalence of the sexes, the normality of homosexuality, types of social organisation that are contrary to human behaviour, and so forth.
Biotechnology and Evolution
Let us note two things: the first, which will shock the old creationist, anthropocentric mentality, is that man is, like all fauna, subject to evolution and not a fixed species. Our distant descendants will not resemble us (biologically), even without techno-science, just as we do not resemble our ancestors the hominids. Evolution did not stop, as if by magic, with the appearance of Homo sapiens. Some biologists think we are risking maladaptive evolution, or involution — at least in certain parts of humanity — because of the slowing of natural selection due to modern medicine, but also because of racial mixture, which often produces badly-adapted hybrids. The long existence of Neanderthal man (we do not know whether or not he was inferior to sapiens) ought to make us reflect on the pertinence of the present dogma of the unitary character of humanity and of there being a common origin of the great races.[10]
Secondly we must note that biotechnologies, from the mildest to the most invasive, depend on ideologies, that is, political decisions, laws, the state of social mores, or even of the market. They can be stimulated, financed, or forbidden; made universal or reserved for an elite. A strong State, eugenicist and authoritarian, will not use biotechnologies in the same way as would a humanist State or a neutral ‘libertarian’ State entirely dominated by the laws of the market. Laboratories do not of themselves determine the applications or even the orientation of their research. It is the ideological, political, and economic environment that determines them.
All of this goes to show that we are not able to foresee anything, so changing and influenced by chance are the parameters. One thing at least is certain, however: some biotechnologies have already been perfected or are in the course of development. They will not all see the light of day, and their use will be determined according to the States or ideologies which win out in the future. But the tools exist and, as in military matters, when the weapons are there, they tend to be used.
According to the anthropologist Louis-Vincent Thomas,[11] the evolution of the human species (phylogenesis) is most certainly not finished — which is obvious, for how would humanity escape the law of life of other species? Even better: it is possible that, if genetic manipulations or artificial birth procedures and eugenics through biotechnology are applied to a fortunate elite in the course of the twenty-first century, we will witness the birth of a new human species — or perhaps ‘race’, if one prefers. For the first time, a new species will be the product of synthetics created by a species (according to a process of auto-creation or auto-evolution), something that fills with horror monotheistic mentalities impregnated with theocentrism and the idea of the fixed uniqueness of man in the universe. In reality, however, since the human mind and human artifact are integral parts of nature, this new species of artificial man will still be a product of nature.
It is possible that a new species thus created, which will obviously remain in the minority, could form a sort of elite that could no longer reproduce with the rest of humanity because of incompatible genomes. Will the myth of the Superman be within reach? It is imaginable; nothing excludes it.
Of course, the risk is great, but life is the domain of risk par excellence, that is, of chance and unforeseeability. In the emergence of new species, nature has always been placed under the sign of chance, of randomness. The majority of species have not survived, being poorly adapted. Similarly, if techno-science creates a sort of human-derived species by an attempt at genetic improvement, it will not escape the risks of randomness and unforeseeability. But this is no reason not to play that card with audacious prudence.
It is rather the forms of monotheism and theocentric and anthropocentric conceptions of the world that must be described as artificialist and anti-natural. For they think that not only is God the creator separate from the world he created, but that man made in his image is a kind of immutable creature separate from nature. Man is a divine artifact, especially in Judeo-Christianity and Islam — an immobile species free of evolution or auto-evolution — hence the difficulty monotheistic faiths have in accepting natural laws and phylogenesis.
In reality, true contemporary philosophical thought (if it is inspired by its classical roots) must admit that humanity is only a transitory species. Prophetic as always, Nietzsche spoke of man as a ‘rope stretched between animal and the Superman’.[12] This figure of speech reminds us of the current infancy of biotechnology. On the other hand, thinking of the present condition of the human species as definitive (which the monotheistic dogmas do) is not compatible with current scientific knowledge and research. Whether the human species and all of its races evolve according to the unconscious mechanisms of evolution and/or the conscious manipulation of techno-science, the same implacable logic secundo natura rerum [according to the nature of things] will still be at work. Nil novi sub soli, nothing new under the sun.
What will your descendants look like in several centuries, or hundreds of centuries? They will no longer be humans, but post-humans, regardless of whether they are the product of natural evolution or, perhaps, of the manipulative interventions of techno-science. We have a harder time admitting that we are going to give birth to different species (no longer human) than to recognise that we descend from non-human beings or animals. Evolution is admitted in the past but not in the future. We are still victims of the belief in the immortality of humanity, in its fixity — which poses the problem of the validity of humanism. No, man does not exist forever, but for a very short period of time.
However, there now exists for the first time an interference between the political history of humanity and its biological evolution. If techno-science succeeds in modifying the evolution of our species — and this
in the short term — human history and biological history are going to telescope. This is the notion of the Anthropocene Age.[13] The short term and long term are going to interfere with one another. Human historicity has a chance to intervene (as a risk factor and an accelerating factor) in the very course of the history of life and of the planet. There is nothing extraordinary about this. It does not abolish the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth in new forms. It should not make us forget that life on Earth is a tiny grain of sand in universal space-time, something the dissident Christian, Pascal (the greatest French philosopher), understood, thereby defying the anthropocentrism of Christian dogma.
When one considers the scale of the universe, the attempts of human techno-science to manipulate the mechanisms of biological reproduction are like a single dull-coloured pixel on a giant screen. Nevertheless, they are part of the order of things, and nothing can stop them. Nothing can stop the erratic (probably cyclic; the Big Bang, if it ever happened, was perhaps one episode among billions of others) march of nature in the immensity of space-time in which, most likely, thousands if not millions (and more) of other forms of life have lived, are living, and will live.
Rearguard Actions Against Biotechnology
Biotechnologies are an extension of sex, though a different sort of sexuality, since it is still a matter of the reproduction of the species. From the moment technologies for genetic manipulation are invented, it is obvious that they may be used for several types of application, going well beyond purely therapeutic ends and the injunctions of ‘bioethics’. In fact, science is neutral; it offers new possibilities, and only political and commercial will shall dispose of them.
Sex and Deviance Page 35
