Man is a seeking and exploring being. We “boldly go where no man has gone before...”
Is this recent explosion of what rightly, and only, can be called “anti-human” technology, a result of the limits of our exploration being confined by the lack of curiosity of totalitarian oligarchies intent only on their wealth? On the spending of research money not on exploration but on familial destruction through anti-humanism, transgender mutilation and sterility, and the loss of fertility and family with the rise of anti-familial feminism? Is it yet another result of the level to which we have entitled women that now the entire purpose of the female of the species is outsourced for the sake of her convenience?
What Shafer does exceptionally powerfully is to demonstrate, step-by-step, how the application of new technologies and commercial surrogacy processes to reproduction is already radically redefining both family and human personhood within the liberal managerial worldview, not only in theory but in law. And he then shows how this redefinition must logically lead to a truly totalitarian social and political dynamic, in which children become not persons but assembled products, and parents (if they can be identified as such at all) merely “provisionally accredited custodians” of this property on behalf of various stakeholders, and ultimately the state.
Is the unquenchable need to explore by our brightest now focused against our own future … because we have refused for so long to think big in our exploration… that now we only think small? Gametes vs. galaxies?
The impacts of these explorations into the tiny, in this example, manufactured “global babies,” are so fraught that dismissing them simply as “look what I can do!” may well be existential.
As noted in the linked piece,
British ethicist Oliver O’Donovan once wrote in passing of “a position too familiar to technological society, that of having achieved something that we do not know how to describe responsibly.”
Nor, it seems, whether we should do something, just because we can.
Will our planned return to the moon and journey to Mars give to those now exploring how to diminish the family and fertility, new objectives to research, objectives with positive, rather than negative, outcomes for humanity?
Will mining of asteroids cause technologists and scientists to again focus outside ourselves and to our future?
Will the obvious next steps of finding and colonizing one or more exoplanets provide a more fruitful scientific journey for these explorers than replacing the human path from past to future with what reasonably can be called “strays?”
Will actively searching for a future create a moral and scientific environment that, of necessity, turns us from the current path of using and exploring science to terminate ourselves, to one in which we again seek to have our reach exceed our grasp… and use science to extend our grasp rather than destroy who and what we are…?
For, if we begin developing babies and humans with no past, no genealogy, no heredity, no clan, no mother, no father, no siblings…. does a “self” any longer even exist?
If there is no “self,” “ourselves” cannot exist. And humanity will end.
Perhaps Musk, in taking us to Mars, is - literally - saving us from species suicide?
As culture, we must return to valuing women and what they, alone, can do: continue our species. Their primary role must be their celebrated role. And the celebration of the non-reproducing must end.
Or WE will end.