In this book Brian Appleyard faces squarely the idea that it may be possible for humans to be no longer human in the genetic future. That is, it may become possible to engineer ourselves so that we retain little of the humanity we have today. If ever I have been tempted to behave like an ostrich it is in not facing the overwhelming philosophical and biological ramifications of the genetic revolution happening around us.

‘We are in the process of taking control of life. Some aspects of this process will appear to be no different from previous scientific and technological developments. Other aspects, however, will be profoundly different. We will produce new species, diagnose illness long before it happens, “know” human beings at the biochemical level, manipulate our reproductive processes, and change ourselves.

Such developments are like nothing that has gone before. The represent a fundamental redefinition of human capability.’(p.24-25)

This book is a meticulous examination of the real (not the scientific) meaning of this process.

Painstakingly and with great clarity it details the roots of biological determinism, the history of eugenics and its present day thinking, the consequences of the Age of Reason, and the triumphal march of science to a belief that we are but the sum of our genes and that the manipulation of them can only be for the betterment of mankind. Entwined in this thinking are the theories of evolutionary psychology, of psychobiology, of gene therapy and these are eruditely explained.

It is to the author’s credit that he does not let his reader get lost in a confusion of conflicting viewpoints. The ideas of Kant’s enlightened man – of every individual as an end in himself are presented with as much clarity as those of eugenics which threatens to overturn the moral basis of such thinking. The beliefs of the creationists are juxtaposed to the evolutionists. The book itself is structured around polarized views of reality – the metaphysical versus science, free will versus determinism, spirituality versus genocentrism, knowledge from the world of the arts versus that from the science.

Appleyard also notes the overwhelming power scientific thinking has today. To refer to knowledge as “scientific” is to give it an aura of truth. The pronouncements of geneticists are accepted as infallible. There is great difficulty in querying anything put forward as good by science as it seems to emanate from a ‘vast black box’ (p. 3) whose contents we cannot possibly understand. And now we are being told that the manipulation of our very core is in our best interests.

Passionately argued in the final chapter is the thesis that we cannot accept the thinking of any single group of people, no matter how seductive. We must contemplate it with a rigorous doubt. Neither can we assume that we have learnt the lessons of history when there is absolutely no evidence that the human race ever has. The idea that the manipulation of genes will in the end produce a god falls down because we only have a human template. And if we insist on reducing everyone to “normal” it is very likely we will engineer out of humanity our Michael Angelos, Albert Einsteins, Winston Churchills and Sylvia Plaths. Who is to decide that a gene is all bad? Appleyard mentions a friend with an appalling genetic disease whom he admires and dearly loves. Where do the virtues of courage and fortitude weigh on the genetic scales? Pascal writes of A Prayer to Ask God for the Right Use of Sickness but there is no room for the human response of cheerful endurance, or the capacity to transform the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The assumption that all such misfortune is to be avoided forgets that misfortune embedded in the sublime and to seek a resolution is the human condition.

‘I am consoled, though perhaps not finally convinced, by that supremely religious belief, that every honest searcher will, in time, be a finder’.

Thus this book ends. It has pulled no punches about the stark reality of the genetic revolution we are faced with. It does not comfort itself with quasi-religion, ideas of easy social intervention or of any easy solutions at all. But in its very setting down of the history and philosophy and science of this gigantic change it instills a hope that mankind will contemplate such a restructuring of its reality long enough to act with wisdom.

Fran Gillespie writes about herself:

I am a mental health consumer of forty years standing. My family is steeped in this experience as we have traced it through four generations I therefore have also a personal understanding of caring in this difficult area. In the last five years I have moved from hiding under the blankets to giving evidence to an enquiry into the human rights of the mentally ill in Australia to spearheading an understanding of the mental health consumer as a resource in our community in Hobart, Tasmania. With the support of likeminded people a system of paid consumer consultants arose from this activism. I am at present on leave from studying for a research Masters in Medicine that centres on an analysis of the development of mental health consumerism in Tasmania. I believe that it is necessary to set aside anger generated from personal experience in this area in order to achieve lasting solutions. Thus I also work as a consumer advocate.

Categories: Genetics, Philosophical