From eugenics to eugenics - Books - Playing God?: Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate - Book Review

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Brewster Kneen, John H. Evans

Playing God?: Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate

Chicago, 2002. $21.99 (cloth).

It's hard to find a book that is really worth reading, let alone exciting, on any aspect of biotechnology. So much of what is on offer is nothing more than a thinly disguised sales pitch for biotechnology, by which I mean genetic engineering--not brewing beer or making bread or selecting seeds for next year's crop. It was therefore with great pleasure that I read John Evans's careful analysis and thoughtful description of the social and political construction of the professional activity called bioethics.

I was drawn to the book because when I glanced through it in the bookstore I saw names, dates and statements. It was clear that this book was not more determinist mystification but an account of how the content of bioethics got to be as "thin" and limited as it is today, and why the professional "ethicists" are not responsive to the public but actually in league with corporate sponsors and government bureaucrats while parliamentarians and legislators are reduced to spectators.

Before going into the substance of Evans's argument, a note about his method, which is explained in great detail in a twenty-one-page appendix: Evans's analysis is based on a bibliographic search to establish the "population" which has carried on the debate about human genetic engineering (he uses the acronym HGE throughout). He defines this "population" as all books and academic journal articles published on this topic from 1959 to 1995. From the more than 52,000 items identified, Evans creates a "universe" of 1465 items that constitute the database for his analysis. He then breaks these down into "communities" ("scientists," "theologians," "philosophers," "bioethicists") and places them into a series of carefully defined timeframes.

Evans begins with the 1960s when "reform eugenecists," as he refers to them, were promising to explain the meaning of life if they would be left alone to proceed with their biological program. The slogan of the fifties, "better living through chemistry," was being simplified to "better living" or "human betterment." The word "eugenics" was, of course, not used in public in the aftermath of Nazism.

But the tidy postwar suburban dream of perpetual progress shared somewhat equitably amongst a largely homogeneous and docile citizenry began to unravel in the mid-sixties. "Public confidence in technological development as the key to social progress," said Susan Wright in Molecular Politics (1994), "gave way to disenchantment"; and there was mounting dissatisfaction among the younger generations that were supposed to be the beneficiaries of Progress and a stable social order. The dirty anti-communist war waged by the U.S. against the Vietnamese exposed the nastiest side of the technology of progress (including massive defoliation by means of Monsanto's Agent Orange) and ignited a growing demand for public control of science.

Fearing that the public might spoil their unlicensed tea party, scientists began to mobilize to defend what they regarded as none of the public's business. Evans uses the words of Ward Madden in 1970 to express the anxiety of scientists: "Science is exuberantly flooding the world with knowledge...transforming both our minds and our daily existence...revolutionizing our concepts of the universe, life, man, and man's destiny...[and] producing a thoroughgoing technological reordering of our habits and activities. And yet, strangely, there is a counter current to the scientific tide...'a counter culture' [that has placed] science on the defensive, even in the midst of our success" (61).

At the same time, Evans points out, liberal theology--Catholic as well as Reformed--was at a highpoint of social influence and theologians were both vocal and visible in the debates about eugenics (the meaning and improvement of life) and genetic engineering. Karen Labacqz, at Pacific School of Religion at the time, was one who articulated the "radical" position: "God is understood [in liberation theology] to side with the poor and oppressed....The primary criterion [for] judging the uses of genetic engineering and related biotechnologies [would be] the impact of those technologies on the balance of power and the life prospects of those who are poor, oppressed, or deprived of power in our society" (119). The social character of liberal theology as expressed here contrasts sharply with the individualism of the evangelical theology that has subsequently supplanted it in popularity.

Along with its concern for social justice (as opposed to personal, individual justice), however, liberal theology brought with it a universalizing tendency expressing the U.S. "melting pot" approach to ethnic diversity, or what we might now refer to as human biodiversity. As an alternative to social and political democracy capable of recognizing and making space for a diversity of views and cultures, a universality and uniformity of the lowest common denominator was both sought and imposed. The Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican immigrant enthusiastically (if only for public consumption) waved the American flag on the Fourth of July. The anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War decades made little space for serious expressions of diversity. But then, liberal democracy has always been more liberal than democratic.