About Flesh Machine by the Critical Arts Ensemble
by Caitlin Moore
Eugenics is a way to alter the genes of an embryo. It allows parents to choose what kind of child they want. For example, they could decide if they want the child to have blue eyes, a left brained mind, a straight sexuality and a cis-gender. In Nazi Germany, mandatory eugenics was a top-down procedure. These days people must be made to believe in a certain myth for eugenics to become popular. Eugenics is sold as a concept to middle class nuclear families who want nothing more in life than their child to succeed.
People in nuclear families may opt for their kids to be genetically altered before they are born in order to make them more likely to get ahead in our capitalist world. Instead of connecting with the child using their heart, they would use the child as a way to advance the family. Families with nonnuclear tendencies, which may be of a lower class, may also have more children and thus the pressure isn't on them to get ahead in the capitalist dimension. Their lives are "more satisfying" because they are less obsessed with class.
Eugenics have a dark history. This election for modern eugenics was predated by mandatory eugenics, as in those used by the Nazis. Nazis sterilized as well as selectively bred -- they wanted to create an über race of humans. After this, and to this day, while science that leads to people confronting death later is accepted, it is suspect when used to affect birth. It seems taboo at this time to "play God." However, Frederick Osborn, a visionary of eugenics, thought at some point eugenics would be as popular as vaccinations.
Different forms of eugenics exist today. Eugenics is placed in the same box as other scientific advancements like the buying and selling of organs and other human organic matter. A way around this particular issue is to sell artificial and cloned organs. Another part of this is the donation of sperm and eggs. When it comes to this, interestingly, eugenic standards are held for the quality of the sperm and the eggs. Their donor must be robust and have a clean health history. So using eggs and sperm from the lab is a slight form of eugenics. A parent who uses an outside embryo also gets to decide which one they want if more than one of the eggs gets fertilized during the process. This has the flavor of eugenics, too. Especially since if more than one egg is viable, the parent can pick which one they want based on secondary characteristics like hair color and gender.
The future of eugenics will happen because eugenics is a step into the pool of bourgeois society. It is all about capitalism and how to get to the top. It will probably be used by the bourgeois class if it does come to be. People always desire more. Better house, better vacations, thus better kids. It is a "reason for existence itself." It may be a part of our future, if capitalism and the nuclear family live on in the world. On the other hand, we may go in the other direction. Maybe love of unique people and the acceptance of a person's true essence and way of being will be more important than perfection: a word still used to describe only Nazis and their twisted minds.
1 comment:
Eugenics, as you say, has a terrible history and terrible associations. That is why it is so unnerving to confront in this piece the realization how many eugenic assumptions and aspirations and practices have crept into our own norms and forms. To identify eugenic practices with the unspeakable coerced eugenics of the Nazis risks absolving the Allies of eugenic administration in their own liberal bourgeois societies prior and during the Nazi period, but also risks indifference to forms of eugenic pressure that can be peddled as non-coercive or non-mandatory when they are not simply by comparison.
As you highlight in your summary, in a society that celebrates individualism and competition (however hypocritically) it is quite easy to market "enhancements" of appearance, performance, health in the service of presumed advantage that yield eugenic impacts. To the extent that these competitive-accumulative performance norms are inculcated as ideals toward which we should strive as consumers, as students, as trainees we find ourselves in a world in which eugenics are indeed as popular as vaccinations, as you say eugenicist Osborn once joked (I'm just setting aside all the anti-vaxxer buttons now lighting up the control board), but in which we disavow that reality as our own.
I would have liked a bit more in the fourth paragraph. You are bringing up lots of issues there -- egg harvesting, surrogacy, IVF, with glimpses too of designer babies, reproductive cloning. Bioethical questions of informed consent and duress, cosmetic vs heritable modification, normalization and abnormalization come into play when we try to weigh all the costs, risks, benefits here. Although your precis does reflect the critical assessment of the piece very well, I do think the issues in this paragraph could use some more attention. If you were to edit the piece again, I might suggest you think about the overall order of your paragraphs also, which to me felt a bit jarring. Right now new paragraphs sometimes feel like changes of the subject rather than developments from prior points. I'm wondering, did you do a lot of moving text around in the editorial phase of this? Even so, you have captured the thrust of the piece here. Good work.
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