First, let's look at this wonderful interview with Leon Kass, courtesy of The American Enterprise. Dr. Kass has been out of the limelight for some little while now, but he more than makes up for his absence with this morose Q&A session, some of which is unintentionally hilarious.

TAE: Tell us about your parents. Did they have any influence on your interest in bioethics?

KASS: My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and ours was a Yiddish-speaking home. It was also a secular home; we were kept back from school on the Jewish holidays, out of respect, but my brother and I never set foot in a synagogue.

I think the most important legacy of my upbringing was the moral seriousness of my parents, and their preoccupation with questions not only of social justice but of matters of character and issues of right and wrong. My parents did not have any formal schooling, so they came at these large questions in human terms.

My father was a saintly man, and he loved this country. My mother, a socialist, was a harsh critic, a perfectionist, and she always laid great emphasis on matters of human decency and dignity. It is these last two concerns and qualities that I've tried to bring to bear in my studies of biotechnological advance.

TAE: When did you first become interested in science and medicine?

KASS: High school biology made a big impression on me, and I had a chemistry set I puttered around with as a youngster. At the age of 15, I entered the University of Chicago, and I had some notion of studying law and biology. But on the placement tests I did especially well in the sciences, so they gave me a pre-med adviser and suggested I take calculus and chemistry in my first year...

I ended up going to medical school at the University of Chicago, and after that pursued a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard. I had decided I wanted to become a professor, doing basic research but also studying some of the more philosophical questions in biology...Ethics then was a dead field. I'd try to start an ethics conversation and the people at the university would just laugh...

I have to add that another reason I got my Ph.D. was to avoid being drafted into the Army--something I'm not at all proud of today. It wasn't so much the Vietnam War, it was just my dislike of wasting time and having to take orders...

TAE: Lore has it you were involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

KASS: In the summer of 1965 my wife Amy and I went to Mississippi to work for an organization called the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Ironically, that's when I began to doubt the liberal enlightenment view on which I had been raised. I started wondering about the relation between progress in the arts and sciences and the state of morality and character, for I found more honor and decency among Mississippi's unschooled African Americans than among my fellow graduate students at Harvard.

Harvard's liberal students had all the right opinions, but they'd just as soon knock you over if you got in their way...

TAE: Why has a Republican-controlled Congress for the most part not acted on any of the council's proposals?

KASS: Well, we have an appropriations bill rider banning the patenting of human organisms. And we have a moderate funding policy for embryonic stem cell research--which will be overturned by the next Democratic President. But that's it.

At present we have a President as friendly to the concerns of human dignity as we have had in a long time, or are likely to have for a long time to come. We have a Congress that is equally sympathetic. So it would be tragic if we came to the end of the second Bush administration and had nothing more to show for it in bioethics legislation. But the President has powerful opponents out there...

Unlike every other major industrialized country that has biotechnological activities, we alone have virtually no official monitoring of these develop-ments from an ethical point of view.

I would very much like to see some legislation, though I do not favor many outright prohibitions. I'm much more inclined to go the regulatory route.

But I would like to see us take advantage of the current political situation to erect at least some barriers against the more egregious practices that are in the offing...

TAE: Your disagreements with liberal bioethicists are well known, but could you tell us more about your disagreements with conservatives?

KASS: First of all I want to say that although I think some pro-lifers' views are too narrow, they deserve credit for recognizing how easy it is to exploit and abuse the early stages of life for utilitarian benefits...

However, I think they take too narrow a view of what's at issue with these bioethical decisions...

I had one leading pro-life activist tell me in private that they were not sure they could support our proposed ban on transferring human embryos to the body of an animal because it might be the only way in which you could rescue a human embryo.

I said, "Do you mean you would rescue an embryo by giving it a pig for a mother?" And this person said, "Yes, if necessary."

This seems to me an unhealthy monomania.

TAE: In terms of medical progress, was the twentieth century a golden age, where we found cures for many of the worst diseases, but hadn't yet reached the scary "Brave New World" that may arrive in the twenty-first century?

KASS: Before the twentieth century millions of people lived in abject poverty, died in childbirth or infancy, and so forth. So I don't want to say that modernity went wrong--that would be hypocritical. But I'm worried about where technology is taking us now...

Technology is more than machinery and acquired power to change the way things are. At its root, the technological disposition believes all aspects of life can be rationally mastered through technique. So now we have techniques for solving marital problems, grief, and almost everything else...Eventually the things that really matter--family life, worship, self-governance, education of the next generation--become threatened.

TAE: So where do we turn for answers? Philosophy? Religion?

KASS: Those things. And great literature too. It's remarkable how in an age that has a reasonable claim to being called decadent, young people still respond to fine works of literature with noble sensibilities and deep insights into enduring human matters...

TAE: What about science itself as a source of wisdom?

KASS: I think modern science is a religion for many of its practitioners, by which I mean they have utter faith in the sufficiency of their concepts to give a full account of life. But science cannot be a source of wisdom...

If modernity went wrong, it was in taking the partial truths of science to be the whole truth about the world. One needs to recover a certain sense of the genuine mysteries of our existence on earth, which science doesn't explain but rather tries to explain away...

We need to restore a more philosophical science.

TAE: How do you respond to scientists who say they're just seeking to help us live healthier, better lives when they "play God" in the lab, say, by trying to conquer aging and doing battle with decline and death?

KASS: They say that they are only trying to prevent degenerative arthritis, Parkinson's disease, or senility, to make old age less burdensome. But whether they know it or not, they are unlocking the process of senescence, and making us less inclined to make way for the young.

No matter how long we live, most of us will not look upon the world with fresh eyes when we are old. There are exceptions...But most of us go to sleep before our time, and what you need are children and a new generation to see the world afresh.

TAE: In thinking of your grandchildren's future, are you a pessimist or an optimist?

KASS: I have to say that I'm pessimistic. I think growing up in the United States in the post-World War II era was as good a time as one could wish for--we got all those things that were in the 1939 World's Fair: washing machines, dishwashers, products to relieve the arduous toil of everyday life. Yet all those things haven't made anybody happier. We're not grateful for those devices.

You could not today put on a World's Fair and arouse intense longings for a future we don't know...I myself have no desire or curiosity to see 2020, never mind later, except for the fact that I am deeply in love with my grandchildren, and I want to see how they will turn out and to be around to share as much of their life as I can.

But I don't envy them their adolescence. I don't envy them the difficulty of finding husbands--they're all girls--or finding private happiness of the sort that I have been blessed to enjoy. I don't envy them the possibilities of getting the kind of liberal education that I've had. I don't envy them living in a post-9/11 world, or the "plugged in" culture. I hope that they will find pockets where they can enjoy what modernity has to offer without becoming its slave. But I wouldn't trade my life for theirs.

Well. So much for the mopery. For some prime dopery we now turn to James Kunstler, peak oil doomer. Let's all be very quiet and respectful.

He's having an insight.

May 8, 2006

Riding the van out of the airport Friday night to the Park-and-Fly lot, with the planes floating down in the distant violet gloaming, an eerie recognition came over me that life today is as much like science fiction as it will ever get -- at least as far ahead as I can see. Some of my friends' kids may never fly in airplanes. They may never own cars. At some point twenty, thirty years ahead, they may not take for granted throwing a light switch in a dark room.

Our sense of normality will be coming up for review soon, and hardly anybody seems ready to face it. The now-consistently moronic New York Times played a story in the Sunday business section which said that "consumers" were just shrugging off three-dollar gasoline and spending like gangbusters in the super discount box stores. It seems not to have occurred to the editors that perhaps three dollars a gallon is not the final destination of our pump prices...

I think our future perception of all this will be as a kind of reverse science fiction -- in the sense that sci fi has until now always been presumed to take place in the future. The science fiction of my friends' children will take place in the past. When some of them are old, the omnipresent electric power of this time, and all the wonders that ran on it, will seem like an unfathomable occult force that saturated the world like a spell. They will tell stories about it in the flickering firelight, and their grandchildren will blink in amazement.

It's too bad they will never see a Harry Potter movie, with its utterly blase and incessant deployments of magic. These children of the future will be astonished when somebody manages to roast a parsnip.

To be fair, I think he's just kidding about the parsnip. As for the rest, who can say?