TDR Interview: Peter Lawler: Stem Cells, Nanobots, and God

By A. Brock Kraebel | Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Editors' Note: Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at Berry College. Since 2004, he has served on the President's Council on Bioethics, and he is also executive editor of Perspectives on Political Science. His new book, Stuck With Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future is being published by ISI Books this fall.

The Dartmouth Review: The Council on Bioethics defines its objective as advising the president on ethical issues relating to advances in biomedical science and technology. How do you view your role on this council?
Peter Augustine Lawler: Well, something very much like that. I came on the council after the stem cell controversy was largely over, but the two reports were issued since I have been on there. The first has to do with advances in scientific research to allow for the harvesting of embryonic-type or pluripotent stem cells without the actual killing of embryos. Our purpose was to make known to a wider audience the facts that show that the stem cell controversy depends upon a certain stage in science that is about to be surpassed. This fact means, for example, that the people in California were suckers to vote in that huge amount of corporate welfare on the premise that only in their state would there be freedom to pursue scientific research on stem cells and all that. So, this report, if widely read—and it was widely noticed when it was put out—would be of great interest to voters, it would seem to me, so they do not fall victim or so they are not suckered by the idea that the people are who are against killing embryos are slowing down scientific research in any important way, or so they do not believe the scientific ballet dance around the idea that Reagan or his dad could have been saved if only this research had been pushed a little more quickly, or that Superman could have been saved, or something like that.

The most recent council report is on end of life issues: on living wills, advance directives, on the limits of the ownership society when it comes to taking care of an aged society, what the proper response is to the people who are going to spend a decade or more in very frail and often demented conditions. This report has been criticized by some libertarians as sounding German Christian Democratic or something to that effect. But it is true enough—that we have an aging population is true enough, and so is the fact that people characteristically no longer die quickly. And so the default death of the average prosperous person who looks out for him or herself very well is going to be Alzheimer's disease, and it is hard to integrate Alzheimer's into the ownership society.

TDR: I think it is easy to see how the medical doctors have a role on a bioethics council, when these are the issues you are addressing, but as a political scientist, how do you fit into these kind of decisions?
PAL: Well, the theory of the council is this—that ordinary citizens can understand science well enough to make prudential judgments, and that scientists, characteristically, are really bad at this sort of thing, and you can see that this point is true, right? You know, the fact that every famous scientific expert has been an idiot when talking about politics. So, contrary to what you might think, it is easier for the person trained in political philosophy to figure out the science than the other way around. Political philosophy is a lot closer to rocket science than even rocket science. So, you know, while it is hard to do scientific experiments and all that, it is not particularly hard to understand the results of them. So I could not do what your [brain sciences professor] Michael Gazzaniga does up there in Hanover, but I can read his books and understand them fairly well.

Meanwhile, he is kind of tone-deaf to the key political and moral issues: when it comes to the embryo, he thinks, well, no brain, no heart, no problem. And the issue is somewhat more complicated than that. I mean, like I say, it is a lot more complicated—and there are many reasonable people who could be on either side of this debate. So, you do not actually need that many research scientists. And the medical doctors on the council are usually famous for having some other expertise, like Paul McHugh is a great writer, a philosopher of sorts. He was the guy who cured Tom Wolfe because Tom Wolfe liked to read the same thing McHugh read. In fact, if you read Tom Wolfe's great book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, the introduction comes from one Council member, Paul McHugh, and then the professor of neuroscience in the book is modeled on Gazzaniga, actually, so actually two council members are involved. Even Gazzaniga is a lot more philosophic than most experimental scientists.

But, the council, to tell the truth, is more or less a failure on the political front. There is too much disagreement to come together on some kind of regulatory scheme for things like cloning, in vitro fertilization, and so forth. The council has been well aware that America is the most moralistic country in the world and the least regulated country in the world when it comes to these things. But the moral division makes agreement on the council almost impossible and in the country as a whole, simply impossible.

TDR: With regard to this divisiveness, in an article in Slate Magazine last March, Saletan said that a clear difference exists between the way Catholics and Jews act on the Bioethics Council. Is that your experience? Do you see issues falling along those lines?
PAL: Yes, there are differences, but those differences are rather subtle and in some ways unimportant. There is not much of a difference between Leon Kass and I, for all practical purposes. I mean, there are differences between Kass and James Q. Wilson, who just resigned, and the differences between Francis Fukuyama and Michael Sandel are much greater.

The Catholics, not me particularly, but the new Natural Law Catholics tend to be all for modern science, except insofar as it kills embryos and old people, and they think the killing of embryos is murder, of course. Kass is not so clear on that, and Orthodox Jews are not so clear on that. Orthodox Jews are somewhat more likely to be in favor of modern technology insofar as it promotes the biological family, so Orthodox Jews might go along with in vitro fertilization or even cloning, if that is the only way you could get your genes into the next generation. Catholics actually believe in life after death and Jews do not, and so Jews are more concerned with dying with dignity, while Catholics ultimately do not see how you die as crucial. So, there are differences, and the differences boil down to an argument over the details of the report. Gilbert Meilaender, who is not one of the Catholic members, was upset with certain passages in [the council's report] Taking Care, which suggested that the quality of your life would have something to do with end of life decisions. An example of such a decision would be when someone who really lived a very dignified, high-tone life might be allowed to die earlier than someone who did not. The guy who wrote this report, Eric Cohen, never did flesh this point out very well. I objected some, but it was not that important in terms of the report as a whole. Meilaender was very upset, Robert George was somewhere in between. So the Natural Law Catholics might be somewhere between the pure Christians and the Jews. Meilaender is the only guy on the council who will admit that being a Christian is the bottom line for him. The Catholics will all say that Natural Law means that the fact that what we say is true could be seen by someone who does not hold to our religious beliefs—in principle, at least. So, the Catholics are all Thomistic in some way, like Mary Ann Glendon, Robert George, or even Paul McHugh in a way. Although Paul McHugh is a piece of work—he is a very unusual man, his positions are quite distinctive, though they are still in the same ballpark.

TDR: Well, I want to come back to this question of religion, but just to stick with the biotech for little while longer: as you have said, you read all of the scientific output, and therefore at this point you must be pretty eminently qualified to discuss the direction that biotechnology is taking. Could you sum up what we could expect to see in the next five years? Ten years? Twenty years?
PAL: Even five years is speculative. A good example is the question of longevity. Molecular biologists and genetic therapists and nanobot experts, people who are familiar with the evolution of computers and the like, they are very optimistic that the life cycle can be broken and that people can eventually live indefinitely long and we can, maybe not completely, but in some limited way transcend our bodies through the implantation of nanobots, genetic therapy, and all these things I only understand in some schematic way. But they can see people living to 150 years old, 200 years old; they can see children being stronger, smarter, and all of that through genetic enhancement. Some of them are very optimistic about virtual reality. It can, I guess, replace real reality with all of its imperfections, and designer mood control is possible.

Evolutionary biologists tend to doubt a lot of this. They think that longevity is fairly fixed, that every attempt to consciously manipulate our genes will produce unexpected evolutionary responses, and any organism is far too complicated to fall under conscious human control—so the big issue becomes the question of whether or not conscious, willful human evolution can replace natural evolution. And I think we do not know, and I tend to be closer to the molecular biologists on this one, because I am more in that court with the fundamental spirit on modern technology generally—that natural limits are always being overcome

So I should think people will start to live a lot longer in the near future. I think children will be genetically enhanced. And there are all kinds of dangers to our liberty here: the pro-choice position will disappear. You will have to abort defective babies, you will have to genetically enhance your children; it will be too risky not to do it. It will happen in the same way that mood control becomes effective in individual lives, and I think it will. It is probable that the same result as you can achieve with Prozac can be achieved through gene therapy that is very individualized. We will start to be able to design moods, which means you will no longer have a right to your anxiety, you will no longer have a right to just being bored. You will have to be in a happy and productive mood all the time. In a way, the key to your individuality would be under siege.

I think, finally, mood control does not work for the same reason evolutionary biologists doubt that indefinite longevity is possible: you would have to know enough in advance to know what kind of moods you would even want. And lurking beneath every attempt to engineer a good mood is a really bad mood, because, basically life sucks unless you take that pill. So I think mood control fails, I think unhappiness will grow in this conscious attempt to engineer happiness. But, that is not to say there will not be tyrannical aspects to it anyway. So, we live in a libertarian world, where we are freer and freer in every area except health and safety, where we get more fanatically puritanical. The health and safety or security exemption to our libertarianism is going to produce all kinds of tyranny. And I think that is going to make the tyranny of the past look like nothing because it's going to be directed more to our emotional lives, our intimate, sexual lives, and so forth.

TDR: This element of biotechnology that involves genetic manipulation, along with being able to select qualities in our children strikes me as being one of the more frightening possibilities, perhaps because it seems so intimate. Do you think, as a college student today, that the ethics of this sort of thing will be something that I am going to be grappling with? Will it be something that will not be a concern until my children are having children?
PAL: It is very hard to know, and I certainly would not want to say what is possible, but we are on the verge of some changes. Right now, we have kind of negative enhancement, where we know enough to eliminate defective fetuses. The next step, the more humane step in a way, would be to be able to manipulate fetuses in the womb or, more likely, to manipulate embryos before they are implanted. This sort of procedure is technically very feasible—it is going to happen. When it will finally happen, when it finally becomes routine… I do not know. But the argument is going to be that, if you could prevent all kinds of diseases up front, why not do it? If you know when you implant the embryos, you can take kind of biopsies of them, just check out a cell or two, and you can really see the propensities for disease the embryo has and decide whether it is healthy enough or fit enough to be implanted. You can also decide what kind of therapy it might require to counteract these propensities. And, while I could not tell you the details of all of this, it seems very feasible to me—it will happen.

TDR: I was struck earlier by one of these subtitles of one of your recent books, Aliens in America. I am not sure if you wrote the title, but it makes reference to "truth" about "American souls." When you are on the council, where do you see these questions of the soul—of religion or religious morals—entering into the discussion for you?
PAL: The real goal for human beings, of course, is to be happy. This biotech is not going to produce happiness very reliably. And so in a certain sense, the great biotechnological effort is in itself evidence that we have souls. I mean, the other animals cannot do this—the other animals are at war with a nature that is out to kill them. The other animals cannot replace natural evolution with a conscious or artificial evolution. So, in a certain way, there is more evidence with every passing day that we have souls. Your typical idiotic American intellectual today is a libertarian sociobiologist who believes Mr. Darwin teaches the truth, but he also believes we are autonomous, and how could both be right? There is no such thing as an autonomous chimp. So, we just massively contradict ourselves on this point. We all think we have souls, it is just the case that the stupid word we use for "soul" now is "autonomy." What other animal can self-create? Autonomy implies a soul. You can make your soul out of nothing; that is the stupidity of it. But it implies a soul.

TDR: So do you see these ideas of a soul coming into conflict with any of the biotechnologies you have been discussing?
PAL: I think that the curve of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century America is growth and wealth, power and freedom and happiness—kind of stable and ambiguous, right? In some ways, we are less happy. In some ways, more happy. There is no such thing as a happiness meter that I would trust.

Nonetheless, religion is not fading out, religion will make a comeback. And imagine the world we are going to have in a generation, where there are going to be very few children, a lot of old people, a lot of old people who are not particularly healthy, where more and more single children are burdened by their parents with Alzheimer's disease, who are compelled by the nature of our restless, meritocratic society to work very hard. People are going to be so much more miserable than ever, and so more in need of God than ever. Europe is just starting to implode, even they are going to have a religious revival. And these riots are just the beginning. So, yes, I think religion has a future. But, see, the great misery of the modern world: we have the same old experiences human beings have ever had, but we have no idea of how to talk about them. We still have a religious dimension or a soulful dimension to our lives, but we don't have the soul-vocabularies that correspond to our experiences. And so we talk therapeutic blather and we use feel-good words, but we do not live feel-good lives.

TDR: We have seen reports of this sort of religious vocabulary making comebacks at schools across the country in the last half-year or so.
PAL: Indeed. Here at Berry, even up there at Dartmouth, there are evangelicals.

TDR: But you have been at Berry for virtually your entire career as an academic. What kind of insight does this experience give you into the way these things are developing?
PAL: At Berry the students are getting more evangelical, that is true, and we have more home-schooled kids, but, at the same time, our administration is getting more resentful, more anti-Christian. We are going through the political correctness of the 1970s thirty years late. And I cannot comment too much on that with my door open right here, but we are just starting to use the word homophobic a lot. It is kind of come and gone at other places, and it has come in here at Berry. We used to attempt to make evangelicals feel badly about having moral reservations about sexual promiscuity and stuff like that.

TDR: With regard to this kind of dichotomy between the administration and the changes in the student body, where do you think religion should come into play? What is its ideal role?
PAL: Evangelicals are—in terms of real life, in terms of family life—amazingly good. The Catholics cannot touch them. Orthodox Jews cannot touch them. The problem with evangelicals is that the evangelical book is too close to an oxymoron. Evangelicals lack intellectual life, and they really need it because they do not have any tradition. Sometimes tradition can substitute for thought, but when you do not have any thoughts or any tradition, then you are in big trouble. As a result, the evangelicals are rapidly becoming Catholics. They are looking for theology, and so they go to C. S. Lewis, and they go to G. K. Chesterton, and it is then a matter of time before they start reading Thomas Aquinas. So, the evangelicals lack intellectual life that would give them the vocabulary that would enable them to talk to their fellow citizens. Because the only remedy the evangelicals have for America is for Americans to convert, and they imply that, if it were not for the absolute truth of the Bible, the vulgar relativism of libertarian sociobiology would be true. They need to talk the language of Natural Law and say that contemporary individualism would be untrue even if there were no God. They need to develop a kind of law language that is not so revelation-dependent. Some evangelicals students have said that they cannot talk to anyone who does not take the Bible seriously. Then they are already politically defeated, because, while America is fairly religious,

I do not think most people go to church, unfortunately. This is why we suddenly have a Supreme Court that is a majority Catholic; even Kennedy is relatively conservative in a way. We have a Supreme Court that is orthodox Catholic, since the Catholics are able to translate the truth of revelation into language accessible to people who do not necessarily believe in revelation.

TDR: The advantage of tradition?
PAL: No, it is the advantage of Natural Law, which does not necessarily depend upon the Bible.

TDR: Since you have brought up this question of the Supreme Court, I would like to turn to your opinion on the nominations. What is your impression of the nomination of Samuel Alito and the attacks the Democrats have leveled?
PAL: Well, he was a tremendous choice. Highly competent judge, low key, not too libertarian—he does not want to declare the New Deal unconstitutional or anything insane along those lines. But clearly, he will be for the rollback of Roe v. Wade, he will not be for the constitutional right for same-sex marriage, and generally he will be for a less intrusive judiciary, so these important moral questions can be argued out by ordinary citizens. The founders had no opinion on abortion, so the Supreme Court should not. The founders were against same-sex marriage, though high technology makes it arguably possible. Americans need to argue about this issue, so he is going to send these issues kicking and screaming back to our legislatures where they belong. And on some of these issues it is unclear whether or not there is a majority. Bush was, as usual, an accidental genius on this—he would not have gotten away with appointing a conservative Catholic white male unless he had tried the diversity thing first and failed. So they will not be able to stop Alito because, in effect, of what was wrong with Miers. She was incompetent, which was a good point. But Alito is hypercompetent—he has the doctrine of Scalia with the confidence of Roberts. Walter Murphy, the great Princeton Constitutional law professor, says Alito was the best student he ever had. His opinions are technical masterpieces. You can see that there is this more Scalia-like guy within Alito that is going to come out once he is confirmed. In a Court of Appeals, you have to go along with precedent, you are not supposed to make new law. But the Supreme Court justices can prefer the Constitution to precedent, and he will do that some.

TDR Interview: Peter Lawler: Stem Cells, Nanobots, and God

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