June 11, 2003
Dear Concerned Citizen,

Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics has written, “It is our difficult task to find ways to preserve [society] from the soft dehumanizations of well-meaning but hubristic biotechnical ‘recreationism’—and to do it without undermining biomedical science or rejecting its genuine contributions to human welfare.”

This crucial task will require informed and committed public participation in which people become aware of both the potentials and perils of our unfolding technological world, and be able to distinguish between the two.

This is not a matter that we can approach at our leisure. Brave New World is closing in upon us at mach speed. Consider the mind boggling technological potentials that have gone, in just the last few years, from science fiction to very real science potential. The most obvious of these is the prospect of human cloning. But following just behind that biotechnology is a radical concept that makes cloning seem about as novel as a transistor radio; the drive toward a post human world known as “transhumanism.”

Transhumanism is a nascent and explicitly eugenic philosophy that advocates seizing control of human evolution through bioengineering. Transhumanists come from the highest levels of academe. For example, the founder of the movement, Nick Bostrom, is a professor of philosophy at Yale University who recently received a three-year fellowship at Oxford University.

Transhumanists are biotech-absolutists. They assert that humans should not merely be allowed to metamorphose themselves through plastic surgery, cyber-technology, and the like, but should have the right to control the destiny of their genes via progeny design and fabrication. This could include replacing natural chromosomes with artificial chromosomes, increasing or decreasing the number of chromosomes in offspring or clones, and even in Hughes words, “mixing species boundaries.”

What is behind such ideas? A misanthropic belief that humans should not be considered special or unique. University of Alabama bioethicist Gregory E. Pence, another enthusiastic proponent of genetic engineering explains in his book, Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? “In some ultimate sense, humans are both nothing more, and as wonderful as, compassionate monkeys.” By “weakening the ethical boundary between non-human and human animals,” he asserts, it will be easier to “do to humans some of the things we think quite sane to do to animals,” beginning with cloning and moving from there to genetic modification.

Transhumanists may intend to take us on a long march to post humanity. But we do not have to acquiesce passively to their human-disdaining agenda. We can, nay, must resist.

Unfortunately, transhumanists have arrived among us at a weak moment when traditional sanctity-of-human-life cultural norms have been undermined significantly. But the future won’t wait for us to regain our moral equilibrium. Genetic science is advancing at an almost reckless pace. If we are going to maintain the equal dignity of all human life in the face of the biotechnological threat, society will have to act.

This brings us back to human cloning. Cloning is the one essential technology that must succeed if transhumanists are to pursue their misguided quest. Stop human cloning, and you have gone a long way toward preventing the post human future.

Happily, the House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive cloning ban. President Bush is eagerly waiting to sign it. That leaves only the United States Senate, where the Brownback/Landrieu Bill (S. 245) to outlaw human cloning is bogged down by a threatened filibuster.

If you agree with me that transhumanist ideology needs to be thwarted before it gains a foothold, I urge you to write or call your United States Senators and urge them to support S-245. Keeping the human future human may, quite literally, depend on it.

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphillis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

--from Brave New World