Biopolitics

by Stefano Vaj

  Rifkin further remarks:

  The new genetic engineering technologies raise one of the most troubling political questions in all of human history. To whom, in this new era, would we entrust the authority to decide what is a good gene that should be added to the gene pool and what is a bad gene that should be eliminated? Should we entrust the government with that authority? Corporations? University scientists? From this perspective, few of us would be able to point to any institution or group of individuals we would entrust with decisions of such importance. If, however, we were asked whether we would sanction new biotech advances that could enhance the physical, emotional and mental wellbeing of our progeny, many of us would not hesitate for a moment to add our support.[92]

  Truth is that the individualist, hedonist and bourgeois worldview can neither avoid the consequences of the new possibilities opened up by biotechnology, nor morally ignore them.[93]

  At the same time, there is no solution to Rifkin’s questions in the realm of the old ideas. Not even a “post-Marxist” like Rifkin, with the stress on “post,” wants to entrust the future of our species to multinational corporations, to a class of civil servants, to the selfish caprices of the consumer, or to governments that today, at best, represent little more than the board of directors of the few public services still in place. And in reality only a historical and political will in the strongest sense, only the ability to envision epochal and very long-term projects in a new beginning, a new “archaicity,”[94] founded on an ethics of self-overcoming, can meet the challenge, and rejoice in it, in name if anything of the amor fati.

  Guillaume Faye writes:

  The present civilisation cannot endure […] In an increasing number of sectors, the mindset and ideology of the modern world, individualistic and egalitarian, is no longer adequate. To confront the future, it will be necessary to resort ever more often to an archaic spirit, which is postmodern, inegalitarian and non-humanist, able to re-inaugurate primordial values […] Progress in technoscience, above all in the field of biology [our italics] and information science, can no longer be managed with humanist and modern values and mentalities. […] The quarrel between traditionalists and modernists has become sterile. One should be neither the one nor the other, but archeofuturist. Traditions are there to be cleansed, skimmed, winnowed. Many of them carry viruses that are exploding in all their violence. As for modernity, it probably has no future.[95]

  The French author clarifies:

  In the 21st century the outbreak of a conflict between the great monotheistic religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, the secular religion of Human Rights) and the progress made by biological and information technoscience is inevitable. Kempf, in his book La révolution biolithique[96] explains that science is about to complete a ‘transition’ comparable to that of the Neolithic revolution, which made homo sapiens transition from hunting and gathering to livestock farming, cultivation and adapting the environment to his needs. We go are going today through a second major mutation, involving at once IT and biology. This revolution consists in the artificial transformation of living beings, in the humanisation of machines (the future quantum and above all biotronic processors) and in the human-android interactions that they will generate.

  And further:

  The anthropocentrism, and the uniform and indivisible definition of “human life” as a value in itself, that make up the main dogmas of the monotheistic religions as well as of the egalitarian ideologies of modernity, enter into brutal contradiction with the possibilities offered by technoscience, and in particular with the “diabolical” alliance of IT and biology. A large scale conflict will oppose laboratories to political and religious leaders who will try to censor and limit the application of their discoveries, probably with little success…The extrauterine gestations in incubators, biotronic androids that are both “intelligent” and “parasensitive,” nearly human, chimeras (human-animal or animal-plant crossbreeds whose patents are being deposited in the United States), the ‘manipuloids’ or transgenic humans, the new artificial organs that will decuple the natural faculties, the creation of super-gifted (or super-resistant) individuals via projects of positive eugenics, cloning etc., all this is likely to tear to shreds the old sacred and egalitarian conception of the “human being” even more radically than Darwin or the theories of evolution could ever have done.[97] The “factory of humans” is about to become a reality: the creation of artificial organs, assisted procreation, stimulation of organic functions, etc.; and the manufacturing of machines functioning by means of biological processes (neural processors, microchips based on DNA) will be possible in the near future. It is all the definitions of man, of life and of machines that it is necessary to reformulate. Artificial men and animal machines…

  Along the same lines, a transhumanist author like Gregory Stock emphasises:

  At first glance, the very notion that we might become more than “human” seems preposterous. After all, we are still biologically identical in virtually every respect to our cave-dwelling ancestors. But this lack of change is deceptive. Never before have we had the power to manipulate human genetics to alter our biology in meaningful, predictable ways…The arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design. We do not know where this development will ultimately take us, but it will transform the evolutionary process by drawing reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more rapid and effective at spreading successful genes than traditional sexual competition and mate selection…Well before this new millennium’s close, we will almost certainly change ourselves enough to become much more than simply human.[98]

  And further:

  Many bioethicists do not share my perspective on where we are heading. They imagine that our technology might become potent enough to alter us, but that we will turn away from it and reject human enhancement. But the reshaping of human genetics and biology does not hinge on some cadre of demonic researchers hidden away in a lab in Argentina trying to pick up where Hitler left off. The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spinoff of mainstream research that virtually everybody supports. Infertility, for example, is a source of deep pain for millions of couples. Researchers and clinicians working on in vitro fertilisation (IVF) don’t think much of future human evolution, but nonetheless are building a foundation of expertise in conceiving, handling, testing and implanting human embryos, and this will one day be the basis for the manipulation of the human species.[99]

  Faye concludes:

  In the 21st century, man will no longer be what he was. What will follow is a derailment of the dominant ethical categories with cataclysmic effects. There is the chance of a mental shock, with unforeseeable consequences, between two worlds: the world of the new biotronic and biolithic perspective, and the world of the perspective of the old monotheistic religions and of modern egalitarian philosophy of Human Rights.[100] Only a neo-archaic mentality will be able to resist this shock, given that once it was not man (or a single God in his image and likeness) that stood at the centre of the world, but multiple gods, who were perfectly able to become incarnated into any life form whatsoever and who represented that to which man aspired in a project of self-overcoming. […] Does this represent the end of humanism? Definitely.

  All this for those of a European origin means that they must choose to claim and reconnect with a heritage that is their own. Giorgio Locchi writes:

  The [Indo-European foundation] myth contains an implicit teaching, founded on a specifically Indo-European value judgement, that wants that man’s authenticity resides in his ability to “master himself,” to “speak” and to “act” instead of “being spoken” and “being acted.” From the moment in which man becomes aware of this capability, that is, from the moment he reflects upon his capacity for self-domestication, a superior awareness arises, and immediately tends to express itself at a social level. To the generic (and spontaneous) man-subject of the magic action exercised on himself[101] is from now
on added the specific (and aware) man-subject of the action exercised on other men.[102]

  Today such a process can be renewed in the passage to the self-aware man, who would be able to overcome in a higher synthesis the crisis of the Second Man and in particular of the moral of the Great Refusal, of the Ewige Nein, which after two thousand years celebrates today its hegemony on a global scale.

  4 .The dysgenic threat

  Besides, the moment when a “third man” becomes a possibility coincides with the time when a number of problems handed down by the second come to the foreground. We have seen how, from the Neolithic revolution onwards, man’s biological context is given by an interaction between the nature and the culture that he inhabits, interaction which determines the features allowing a human group to survive, defines its extension, exerts selective pressures on its members and decides whether it succeeds or fails. Today, nature itself is in the process of becoming a cultural artifact.

  Jacquard writes: “Man lives in a world he himself has moulded. Without realising it, he has transformed, among other things, the conditions under which genes are transmitted from one generation to the next. In pursuing certain ends, be these the cure of a sick child, the production of energy or social stability, he may break natural balances and trigger off a process which, in the long run can lead to catastrophe.”

  Such an admission is rare. Intellectuals and the media generally try to ignore the issue. No one is willing to let his own survival or that of his descendants depend upon their ability to outrun predators, but neither does anyone look benignly at the prospect of a world in which the lower limbs be atrophied in the same way as the visual organs of certain animals that have adapted to living in caves have ceased to be functional.

  At the same time, there exist as we have seen “moral” reasons for disapproving of the fact that the conservation of the use of the legs in the human species could be, instead of a “natural” fact, the fruit of a cultural choice, based on ideological and aesthetic foundations, and implemented through a deliberate intervention on the living conditions to which the group is subjected and/or directly on their gene pool, via perfectly artificial pressures or even via the direct manipulation of its germ lines.

  The reference to a generalised atrophy of the lower limbs seems an extreme hypothesis, but the example of illnesses with an absolutely determining and clearly documented genetic component is clear to anyone.[103]

  Phenylketonuria, a disease caused by a recessive gene, today hits every one in eleven thousand newborns. In homozygous individuals, i.e., those who have received the gene in question from both their mother and their father, the phenylalanine, instead of being eliminated, accumulates in the blood and in the cephalorachidian fluid, provoking gradual idiocy and death. For about the last thirty years, that is, for a generation, the effects of this gene in homozygous individuals, and because of this affected by phenylketonuria, have been eliminated by modern medicine, whenever it has been diagnosed, with a very simple remedy consisting in a diet that reduces to the minimum the intake of phenylalanine. This means that the affected individuals will escape their “natural” fate, which would have been that of undergoing a gradual cerebral degeneration, and of dying before procreating.

  At a frequency of 1/11000 of sick individual corresponds the frequency 1/105 of heterozygous “healthy carriers.” Now, from the moment the affected children are “cured,” the precedent equilibrium is broken, and the number of affected individuals is inexorably destined to rise.

  It is true that, as Jacquard notes, even in the event of a generalised survival of the affected individuals the doubling of the gene’s frequency, which implies a quadrupling of homozygous individuals at each generation, requires in fact fifty generations, that is about 1500 years (not that it is easy to see what would be so reassuring about this, unless in the logic of “after us the flood”).

  This process is however much more rapid for illnesses whose genetic factor is linked to gender, like haemophilia. As we know, the gene for haemophilia has its locus on the X chromosome, that is, the one invariably contributed by the mother. In Europe its frequency is 1/10000. For a woman to be haemophilic, since she by definition possesses two X chromosomes, she must be homozygous, a very rare event that occurs about once in hundred million; but it is enough for a man to have the faulty gene on his one X chromosome for the illness to manifest. The frequency of affected males is therefore that of the frequency of the gene, one in ten thousand. A simple calculation shows how the cure of all the affected individuals could lead to an increase in the frequency of the gene to another 1/30000 at each generation, that is to double the frequency of the illness in one century!

  Nonetheless, to arrive at the frequency of one child in a thousand would in fact require approximately another thousand years. Is it reasonable therefore, Jacquard asks, to fear the danger of a genetic decline of the species when on such time scales “mankind will have to confront much more serious problems, that will endanger its very existence”?

  On the other hand, only the genetic illnesses identified with certainty today are about four thousand. And it is reasonable to expect that more and more carriers will be able to live sufficiently normal lives to allow them to propagate their genes to the next generations[104].

  And so far we are have taken into consideration only objectively and seriously pathological features that are the object of an absolute genetic determinism.[105]

  Other and broader questions are posed by the inheritance of traits that predispose to a certain form of pathology; or even that result in traits that are just dysgenic lato sensu, or that most people regard as highly undesirable.

  A further factor of dysgenic risk concerns for instance traits with a strong quantitative genetic dominance. At what point exactly can the diminishing functionality of the immune system, of sensory acuity, of the efficiency of the nervous system, of skeleto-muscular performance be considered an “illness,” or simply unacceptable?

  The concept itself of illness, as that of “normalcy,” is a cultural concept, and becomes even more so when the negative connotation, in terms of selection of the trait concerned, vanishes or diminishes. But what we know with certainty is that when a given genetically influenced trait is no longer selected against, it tends to spread asymptotically inside the population of reference. Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) already wrote, “The evolution of man is not finished: will he end up god or ape? It is selection that will decide.”[106]

  The most telling example is that of mental retardation. It is not by chance that cases of serious retardation generate revulsion in the majority of people who have not deliberately repressed their instinctive distaste for ideological reasons: as a matter of fact, while many malformations and dysfunctions with a genetic origin are symptomatically undistinguishable from one another, at least at first, with an aftermath of genetically negligible lesions or affections,[107] mental retardation, except for relatively rare cases of severe malnourishment or other pathologies occurring during pregnancy and childhood, is almost invariably of genetic origin.[108] Mongolism, or Down’s syndrome, while not being necessarily inherited (the majority of mongoloids are born to perfectly normal parents), is definitely hereditary, that is readily transmitted to the descendants of the affected subjects, in the case in which these are allowed to reproduce – or even encouraged to do so. In addition, the converging results of genetics and psychometrics seem to show that this is also true to some extent for the possible genetic determinants of all degrees of mental feebleness or acuity.

  To remove the limiting factors to the reproductive potential of individuals who, on the basis of all the criteria that could conceivably be adopted, and according to almost everybody, can be considered at the lowest level of distribution of mental acuity, but not necessarily of other traits compatible with survival, would thus have particularly explosive consequences.

  Indeed, if every gene wants to spread and last, it achieves this end by, as we know, various strategies. For sexe
d species that know varied degrees of parental care, one possible strategy could be that of a very high investment per offspring on a relatively small number of these, while another could be that of numerically maximising one’s offspring at the cost of reducing the investment in each of them.

  Now, let’s admit that a gene that codes for an unfavourable trait as to the carrier’s capacity to plan ahead, to achieve a social standing and to raise its offspring, is able to influence such strategies or to “ally” itself with genes that do, it seems likely that the same gene will be oriented to bet on the “law of large numbers”; or, in other words, to compensate quality (which is hypothetically jeopardised by its presence) with quantity.

  As the popular saying goes, “The mother of idiots is always pregnant.” Usually, when this proverb is quoted, it is to express the speaker’s frustration of coming all too often across people who he considers to qualify, and does not actually refer to the reproductive habits of alleged idiots. It does however contain a grain of literal truth, in the sense that the generation, perhaps indiscriminate, of a great number of children can effectively compensate statistically for their lower probability of success and survival in the long run, or even of replication in subsequent generation, of each of them. This in human societies corresponds to well-known remarks regarding the reproductive behaviour of the disadvantaged social classes (for instance the proletarians of Marx’s day), whatever the reason or justification of their inferior situation; but it also more generally concerns the presence of circumstances that, for the parent involved, influence the reproductive convenience or inconvenience of a high parental investment per unit offspring.