Barriers are falling throughout the Anglosphere. Old legal and moral taboos are being discarded, and a new order is rising to supreme power and prestige.
As America is preparing to elect a president who will have supported abortion rights to an unprecedented extent, as Canada comes to terms with the state having appointed arch-abortionist Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada, as Australia is coming to terms with yet more liberalization of its abortion laws, the United Kingdom may be making the most consequential steps of all, on a wide variety of bio-science fronts including getting rid of the barrier of consent in using human tissue from a greater range of human beings than have ever been considered fair game for no-consent medical exploitation in the Anglosphere. (link)
From the Telegraph story linked above: Human tissue could be taken from the mentally infirm without their consent and used to create embryos for experimentation, under Government proposals added to a controversial bill.
On Wednesday MPs will vote on a bill which would allow the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos to be used for stem cell research, change the conditions for granting IVF, and possibly liberalise the abortion laws.
...
It can now be revealed that a Government amendment, agreed after the main parliamentary debates, would allow tissue to be used from people who lack the "mental capacity" to give consent, children whose parents give permission, and anyone who has previously donated samples to hospitals for medical research but can no longer be traced.
...
"Under the amendment, if a person was deemed unable to give consent their carer would make a decision on their behalf. If the person did not have a carer, researchers would nominate a person to make the judgement. If scientists wanted to use human tissues already donated for research, perhaps during a medical procedure, but were unable to trace the donors because the research had been anonymised or the person had moved house, the samples could also be used."
...
Catherine Elliot, from the Medical Research Council, said such research could provide a "powerful tool" to examine the development and treatment of different diseases. She said research would "rarely" be carried out without consent, because under the amendment, ethics committees must be satisfied the same research could not have been carried out using tissue from patients who had granted permission.
In general, when human beings figure out a way to benefit by doing debatable things to other human beings who can't fight back, whether it's the direct profit of chattel slavery or the benefits of enjoying a freer sex life without having one's career interrupted by childbirth, they go ahead and do it, and revise morality and law as much as is needed to bless profitable practices with acceptability.
If there's anything the progress of the judge-driven legalization of gay marriage should have taught us, it's that slippery slopes are real. When powerful elites in society are determined to have something all the way, as far as they want, and they press for it constantly and often secretively, without regard for past assurances or expectations of moderation (as in this case, where public assurances that consent was fundamental were set aside behind closed doors), then the changes to law and morality that take place can be so radical that anyone forecasting early in the process what would come later would have been mocked; and compromise positions are in reality compromised positions - untenable and swiftly swept away, like the domestic partnership laws that courts are making into mandates for the gay marriage laws that they were supposed to be instead of.
Safeguards in medical decision-making are sufficiently widely honored in the breach that when the case for further liberalization of, e.g. the laws on assisted suicide is pressed, this is a typical argument: doctors are making these decisions, and acting on them, all the time anyway, and it would be better and less hypocritical for the law to accept it. So there is not much reason to think that guardians of the rights of potential involuntary donors appointed by researchers are not going to give researchers what they want.
Clearly, medical researchers now see profit in getting hold of every bit of tissue that might be valuable to them, and alterations to law and morality to let them get at the goodies whenever they really want to - consent or no consent - are now far advanced behind the scenes. There is no reason to think that pressure to alter law and morality in this direction will end with this legislation in the United Kingdom, whether it passes now or is held up, or that similar proposals will not make their way to whichever country you live in.
This seems like a new Kelo: a warrant for the powerful to take from the powerless what they have, as long as there is some plan, with no binding requirement that the plan be carried out or its benefits be real. Only in this new case the property taken is human tissue, not real estate.
There was a substantial political and legal reaction to Kelo, though it's doubtful if the reaction has been enough to remedy the damage to property rights it did.
What should the political and legal reaction be to proposals to remove consent requirements when researchers want to take human tissue?
Given that compromise solutions often prove to be untenable and slippery slope accelerators for elites who want law and morality altered, and given that medical research is a worthwhile cause (which it certainly is) what worthwhile and acceptable reactions can there be?
Or, is it better to depoliticize such alterations in the balance of property rights, and entrust the alteration of these rights, as far as possible, to back-room committees and institutions such as the courts, that don't have to fear much interference from naysayers and neo-luddites?
Update: the bill passed overwhelmingly, 355 to 129 (link)
There is a Biogenetic Engineering - Abortion - Capital Punishment - Euthanasia Matrix emerging that has increasing government involvement, globally. It is frighteningly ugly and is not being addressed.
I think this has to be looked at as a single problem, greater than the sum of its parts. I think it transcends politics and even ethics. It is a survival issue, like atomic weapons and must be recognized and confronted, as such,as soon as possible.
I have a basic belief about government. It will use any power you give it in order to perpetuate itself. That is why one does not give a government the power over life and death. This article seems to confirm my worst suspicions.
By the way, as far as the curing disease nonsense that always accompanies actions like this one, they are the very definition of the cure being worse than the disease.
TOC, you mention a
You left out another component of the matrix; not sure I have a pithy label for it...
The one whose adherents hold that it's a duty of humanity to downsize the human race's footprint here on Earth from 6+ billion to 1 billion or fewer inhabitants.
As soon as possible.
Polite talk in those circles emphasizes simple attrition through aging and natural death (meaning no funding should be given to life-extension research, and essentially giving the nod to the "leave Gramma on the ice floe and wave as she floats out of sight" variety of eugenics).
A few are not so circumspect as all that. Dig it, they stuck a fork in one of those pigs. Wild!
#3 from Nortius Maximus at 7:31 pm on Oct 19, 2008
Yup they are right in the mix.
One of the things I like most in Mexico is interacting with children. They knock on my door to sell me tortillas. They are in evidence everywhere being carried around, in and out of the womb by their parents or mother to be. They play, unsupervised and unregimented, everywhere form the time they are 4 or 5 and there are always more of them on the way.
Adolescents are found in every nook and crannie pressing up against one another in passionate embrace.
As Yeats put it>
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect
I like the attrition to be visited on guys my age. I think the world would be better off without prolonging the life of the Golden Agers. when you get to be my age, they start dropping off like flies and you realize you are going to be one of the dropping flies, imminently.
I don't get the idea of shutting the door behind you once you are born. It seems sort of twisted.
The people you mention seem to be driven by fear and lust for the ultimate gated community.
I think living forever would not be worth missing out on the best moment of my week, every week, when the 4 year old Matildha comes to my door with 30 tortillas still warm from her mother's kitchen. I pay her 20 pesos for them and weekly vie for more attention by giving her another 10 pesos for chocolate. It never works. She takes the ten pesos and walks away. and she never gives me another thought.
Life doesn't get any better than that.
TOC,
This post reminds me of another Yeats poem:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Western Europe is dead and America will follow within the next century give or take a decade or so. Things like this are symptoms of our decay. We live in a rotted culture in the final stages of cultural entropy.
Actually, Fred, I don't think that's necessarily true for the US. I think it is true for Europe, that barring a new outbreak of murderous nationalism, Europe will once again fall to the barbarians. But the US I think is on the verge of something quite different. The closest historical parallel I can see is the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.
I don't think we'd decline culturally; I think we'd become more assertive, and more dictatorial both at home and abroad. And I think that there are people in both parties who are perfectly willing to see it happen, because they are convinced they'll be in charge. It's the recipe for civil war, followed by Empire, and it's far, far too plausible a scenario right now.
David: I mostly agree with you here. Tissue should not be taken from those mentally incapable of responding.
On the other hand, why not give tissue as a "do not resuscitate" option? I would gladly give my body to science, if my only other option was life as a vegetable.
Let's be clear though, this research needs to happen. We're already starting to look at research that will fundamentally change how we prevent ourselves from viruses: how to switch virus genes on & off, how to to isolate, and individually attack viruses & cancer without blutly tearing through the body with chemo and surgery.
The only way to get better at this research is too observe how genetic sequencing affects animal & human tissue. This means three things
1) It's of upmost importance that we keep up with, and understand what's ocuring(even if only at a basic level)
2)To continue to improve the safeguards for generic maniuplation samples
3)To determine the moral boundaries for such research.
To be fair, many scientists are more aware of this than you think. Most scientists I know are against cloning, primarily because the possibility of defects is too high +95%.
Maybe Jeff. But just as certain virtues (which we are losing if we have not completely lost) are necessary for a republic, certain virtues (or qualities; some might not consider them virtues) are necessary to maintain an empire. An empire requires confidence in the superiority of its civilization, discipline, ruthlessness, certainty about its direction, and a willingness to sacrifice to maintain the empire. We have none of those, or to the degree we have them, they are weak and declining. The qualities (and I definitely don't consider them virtues) that we do have--multiculturalism, cultural and moral relativism, identity politics (when the identity is anything other than Citizen of the Empire), self-esteem movements, incapacity to defer gratification, antinomian individualism, and a general social and moral laxity--are not terribly conducive to empire building. So while I see your point, I think collapse is more probable than a Roman-style transition to empire.
I guess I see it somewhat differently. Multiculturalism, relativism and the like are tools. They separate a strong culture from its moral bearings. They create a people without a guiding principle but with a readiness to be led and an inability to tell when they're being snowed. Worse, because of the Long March Through the Institutions, people are becoming increasingly unable to tell what reality is, and increasingly likely to accept arbitrary authority over them. (In other words, we are rapidly returning to a pre-Enlightenment mental model of politics.)
But people want a moral bearing, and that is where Socialism comes in. If we become an empire, it will not be an empire based on the Enlightenment's British strain, but on the French strain, and more to the point on a combination of Socialist economics and Wilsonian idealism. I never said that I would like the basis of the empire, never mind its existence. But I think that it's a far more likely outcome than outright collapse into irrelevance.
David Blue´s post it a very interesting one. I did not mean to get it sidetracked into another interesting line of discussion. This happens when you quote poets as evokative as Yeats.
Maybe someone might want to open a post that contains nothing but Yeats´ Second Coming, the opening stanza ehich is quoted above by
5 from Fred at 1:05 pm on Oct 20, 2008
I don't think Americans will be irrelevant. They don't have the temperament for it.
In dealing with issues like those raised above, I think the Americans have a great advantage in that institutionally they're committed to a separation of powers. There's some level of thought on that that's built into the national DNA. Other countries don't necessarily have that.
Look at the safeguard above:
Most Americans, I think, will instinctively see what's wrong with that.
I want some of your liver, let's say; but you cannot give informed consent, and you don't have a "carer" I can cut a deal with. So, I, or I and my researcher friends with the same collective interest regarding "donor"'s rights or lack of them appoint someone pleasing to us, to decide whether our interests - which we will package as everyone's interests by talking freely of prospective miracle cures - should be satisfied. And if the suitable person to make a judgment makes the right judgment, in our view, we may hire him again to decide cases like this. Easy money!
And that's your safeguard. That's the protection your interest in your own body gets.
That may seem shocking to you or me; but to a lot of people in other parts of the world, where it's standard operating procedure to combine all sorts of powers under the same hat, and to consult the interests of the powerful, the dangerous and the connected a lot, and the rights of the harmless and voiceless not very much at all, this will all seem natural. Where bribery is a way of life, and "transparency" is seen as an annoying and hypocritical Western imposition, what's the problem?
Apparently this safeguard doesn't look too suspect to British parliamentarians either!?
I don't know what the reaction is going to be in America away from this and towards giving people some real protection for rights over their own body. But I'm guessing confidently there's going to be one. It may not be adequate. It may not be well judged. But Americans will make the attempt.
In other parts of the world, it's just going to be elites going "Brave New World: Whee!!" After all, in Communist China, it's already standard procedure to take organs from actual criminals or perhaps just dissidents without consent; to operate closed slave labor camps where such practices can be expanded on and the world will never know (or care), and to impose government mandated family limits and forced abortions even on the general population. Human rights? Property rights? What are those? Empty words, in comparison to the might of the Party!
A lot of national elites will see China as a successful, reasonable, rising power to learn from, including on medical / scientific issues.
That's going to add to America's international and cultural isolation. But not in a way that Americans should be ashamed of.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This is why Yeats is my favorite poet. But actually, TOC, I don't think Jeff and I were as off topic as it may seem. I think David's post shows the moral confusion and antinomian individualism I mentioned above. I still think Jeff is optimistic (as O'toole said about Murphy's Law). I see Americans as becoming enervated and our society as becoming disordered with isolated individuals so unwilling to be led by anything but their own desires that order and stability are impossible. I'm also not as sanguine about the reaction of Americans as David. We're a selfish lot (consider abortion, killing kids for convenience) and becoming more so all the time. The fact that horrors like David describes seem like a good idea to many people (or indeed anyone) is a sure sign of that and of the coming collapse.
Bioengineering, abortion, euthanasia... and sometimes terrorism.
In some European countries we called it the Culture of Death. It is being pushed by powerful groups which want to erode the actual scale of values, paving the way to carry out freely their policies.
The assumption of Death as a tool for getting rid of problems is a step backwards for our civilization, back to the Middle Ages, at least in morality.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572-1631)
Yeats believed in a Magnus Annus that lasted 2,000 years and gave birth to another Great Age ruled by other gods.
Hence, the description of the turning of the Age:
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This was not Yeats only poem on the subject. He gives us a History/Vision of the last turning ushered in by the birth of Christ and it is not very flattering towards the moral system that we have used in the west over the past two millenia
Two Songs from a Play
I
I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side,
And lay the heart upon her hand
5 And bear that beating heart away;
And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.
Another Troy must rise and set,
10 Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo's painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
15 When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called.
II
In pity for man's darkening thought
He walked that room and issued thence
In Galilean turbulence;
20 The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.
25 Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
30 Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.
#11 from David Blue at 8:55 pm on Oct 20, 2008
A lot of national elites will see China as a successful, reasonable, rising power to learn from, including on medical / scientific issues.
That's going to add to America's international and cultural isolation. But not in a way that Americans should be ashamed of.
____________________________________________________________
I agree with much of this, but I am more optimistic about us in relation to China. I feel that China is on the brink of a collapse and it will not be pretty. I think the experiment with totalitarian capitalism is over and its end will usher in another era of warlords, now euphemistically called local party officials.
Over the past 20 years the economic "miracle" in China has been fueled by massive migration from the countryside filling the urban factories with human labor. Not only has this caused tremendous corruption and environmental problems, it has gone along way in extirpating the familial and cultural ties that have held together Chinese society.
China has averaged about 9% growth per year over the past 20 years and has been immune to the business cycle.
China in some recent years had an average migration of 6 million people a month from the country side.
Forget about a recession, what happens if growth slows to 3%.
What is the rise in unemployment? 10 Million, 20, 30, more?
Deng said in answer to a reporter who challenged him by Saying "The west is not happy over the actions your Government has taken in regards to the Democracy movement which is illustrated by their crackdown in Tianamen Square. How do you respond to that.
Deng said, simply, "Ask the West how they would react to 50 Million boat people."
I think people who fear China for its growing power miss the point. Like the old Soviet Union, It is China's weakness that will, in my opinion cause the trouble.
One other thing, China will react to falling exports by lowering the value of its currency. The economic effect of that on the Asian tigers will be devastating.
TOC, Yeats' attitude toward Christianity and Christian morality was complicated and nuanced. His ideal was Byzantium, where he believed art, life, and faith were one, and he recognized the importance of Christianity to that ideal. Of course, for Yeats that was an aesthetic rather than a religious point of view. He rejected what was left of Christianity because he felt it no longer provided that aesthetic unification of life, art, and faith. He briefly became an admirer of Mussoline and a card-carrying fascist because he saw in fascism an analogue of the aestheticization of life he attributed to Byzantium. He saw it as the next "gyre" of history. To his credit, he saw through fascism rather quickly and turned against it before Hitler took power in Germany.
Oops, that's Mussolini.
#16 from Fred at 2:45 pm on Oct 22, 2008
I never said anything different. Just mentioned what I did because it is very easy to choose who his who here:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Unless, of course, you know Yeats and, as you say, his nuance.
#16 from Fred at 2:45 pm on Oct 22, 2008
I never said anything different. Just mentioned what I did because it is very easy to choose who is who here:
_The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity_
Unless, of course, you know Yeats and, as you say, his nuance.
TOC, would you like me to do proper italics on that, delete your double post, and delete these follow-up posts?