Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model. In the last century, eugenics was enthusiastically embraced among Anglo-Saxon elites, then by Communist Russia as a means of creating a hyper-selfless Homo Sovieticus, and, most infamously, Nazi Germany’s drive to create a “master race” via racial-hygiene laws and the extermination of people with disabilities and other “lives unworthy of life.”
Eugenics, a policy that seeks to “improve” humanity, dismisses the importance of bestowing a sense of worth and dignity to all individuals in the quest of breeding only “the finest”. Today, our expanding knowledge of genes and demographics has created eugenic possibilities far beyond those of the last century. Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches that reflect, as New York Marxist academic David Harvey called it, “a fetishism of technology” that transcends conventional politics.
In a way that past eugenicists could only dream, technology now opens the possibilities of engineering something far more radical than sterilizing the weak and giving bonuses to those with the right genetic inheritance. Instead, the looming prospect of an entire biological transformation emerges. For half a century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to better specs before conception, as they look to edit genes to produce “superior” offspring.
New technology — from “gene editing” to in-vitro birthing and cloning — provides new ways to create “the better human.” One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant “Elect,” based not on faithfulness but measurements of IQ and ability. This new dominant class, as Daniel Bell predicted some 50 years ago, can employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “ordering the mass society.”
Promoted by technologists, these efforts tend to be intrinsically “dehumanizing,” as the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned. Eugenic technology, Sacks argued, operates “in detachment, driven by analysis, the breaking down wholes into constituent parts.” In this emerging world, we see the expansion of technology imposed on masses that have become less intelligent not despite but because of ever greater exposure to social media and increasingly, to artificial intelligence.
Don’t worry, at least that’s what those who benefit the most from this shift suggest. Their answers boil down to this: let us lead you into the perfectly honed future. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s influential Softbank venture fund, recently suggested that artificial intelligence would lay the foundation for the creation of the “superhuman.” Not satisfied with making life better, Son now “really wanted to become an architect, to design the future of humanity,” as the Financial Times reported.
Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo credit: Martin Pot, via Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.
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