Archives for June 2019

Henry B. Veatch: Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969.

 

If modern science aims at the conquest of nature, must it not finally aim at the conquest of human nature? And if it aims at the conquest of human nature, must it not somehow conquer reason, long held to be the distinctive human characteristic? To conquer reason, must it not prove reason inadequate? And if it needs to do that rationally, does that convict science of incoherence, ruin its status as ‘science,’ that is, as knowledge?

Or does modern science and the modern philosophy that generated it and continues to support it merely need to posit a different kind of reason, a different form of logic, against the ‘classical’ kind, enunciated by Socrates and elaborated by Aristotle? Nietzsche at times seems to take the first path, attacking reason itself, whereas more ‘mainstream’ philosophers—Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and a host of academic followers of one or more of them—take the second, wider path, proposing a new kind of logic while challenging the capacity of classical logic to answer the question it attempts to answer, namely, ‘What is…?’

Veatch takes his title from C. P. Snow, whose 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures,” had just been reprinted with an addendum. Snow contrasted the culture of scientists with that of “literary intellectuals,” observing that (for example) were Albert Einstein to meet T. S. Eliot they would listen to one another with mutual incomprehension. This would not have been the case, had met Alexander Pope (assuming that one of them brought along a good translator). Veatch remarks that in contemporary intellectual life things have gone beyond two cultures; there are actually two logics now, one for the humanities and another for the sciences, including mathematics. By broadening the field from literary studies to the humanities generally, he brings in the question of the purpose of philosophy, now classified as among the humanities but formerly encompassing the sciences, too. His book engages the celebrated Battle of the Books by conceiving it as at core a struggle for the soul of philosophy, and therefore of philosophers. He astutely sees that political science, founded upon political philosophy, as a sharply-contested part of the battlefield. Whereas formerly “the student of political science had to pore over his Plato and Aristotle, his Machiavelli and Bodin, his Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau,” if present trends continue “the political scientist of the near future will have to know statistics and the latest computer techniques.”

To put it in Jonathan Swift’s original imagery, the spiders war against the bees. “The achievement” of modern analytic philosophy “might be said to consist largely in its having determined both in detail and with some precision the proper requisites of a genuine and unmitigated spider-logic,” a logic whose proponents moreover regard as superior to “the more traditional bee-logic.” Veatch intends “to show that a bee-logic has a proper integrity of its own,” and indeed that modern analytic logic “ought to be subordinate to the properly architectonic knowledge of the more humanistic and philosophic variety.” Like Socrates, Plato, and above all Aristotle, author of systematic treatments of logic, philosophers should begin “by accepting what we are presented with in our everyday experience and analyzing it with a view to disclosing the principles and elements and causes that are directly there and present in it.”

Take modern physics as seen in Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Is it not “passing strange” that its logic, “for all of its elaboration, provides no means either for saying or for thinking what anything is?” But ‘we moderns’ don’t find it strange at all. Aristotelian causality focuses on the internally-generated actions of a thing—the four causes—without ignoring (moderns claim) the importance of the circumstances in which the thing finds itself. ‘Modern’ or Newtonian causality focuses on the external relations among things—planets as they orbit the sun—that is, on systems or networks. Later philosophers have extended this approach to logic. “The logic of all modern knowledge could very properly be said to be a logic of how things work, how they behave, what their relationships are to other things, what verifiable or falsifiable consequences they may have, how they may be manipulated, what uses they may be put to”; the question of what things are has been pushed aside. Spiders are “concerned only with their networks, and not with what their networks describe,” although it should be observed that real spiders do aim at catching real flies.

Why? According to modern logic, “no subject-predicate proposition can ever involve an affirmation of what something is,” because “nothing ever is its property or quality as such.” To say “That leaf is green” literally means that a particular leaf is greenness, that the leaf is the color green; what an absurdity, since “a thing is a thing and not a property.” But, as former U.S. president Bill Clinton once said, following Aristotle in his epistemology if not in his ethics, that depends on what ‘is’ is: “In an Aristotelian context the ‘is’ relationship can never hold between a substance and one of its accidents.” In this case, the substance (that leaf) “may well be green, but it can never be the quality of greenness itself” because its greenness is accidental to its nature, its ‘being,’ as a leaf. A leaf might be green, but it might also be red or brown. The fact of its ‘leafness’ does not necessarily entail the fact of its color. “If it could,” then “a substance would in effect cease to be a substance and become what it is not, viz., an accident, or more specifically a quality.” Therefore, “it is of the utmost importance not to confuse the logical relationship of subject and predicate with the ontological relationship of substance and accident; the former involves an ‘is’-relationship, the latter does not.”

As distinct from classical “what-logic,” modern “relating-logic” may be seen in Wittgenstein’s adjurations, “Look not for the meaning but for the use” and “Treat of the network, not of what the network describes.” If philosophers treat logic, and especially logical analysis, as a relation “not a dissection”—that is, not as analysis, in the ordinary meaning of the term—they imitate modern natural science, which defines planets (for example) in relation to other planets and to the sun, doubting that it can go very far into the substance of objects that are so far away. Turning to ethics and politics, the “traditional conception of the humanities” held that they offered “a knowledge at once theoretical and practical, of what man is and of what it means to be human.” Modern-scientific attempts to define ‘humanness’ rely on such methods as the ‘personality test,’ which establish correlations between certain questions and certain character traits—a correlation “between a true or false answer to a given question and the sort of behavior that has been defined as being characteristic of the trait in question.” So, if the answer ‘Yes’ to the question “I like pickles” correlates with the trait of dominance, the person who answers ‘Yes’ to that question (and to other questions so correlated) will be described as a ‘dominant personality type,’ although the preference for pickles may in fact be entirely accidental to the trait. This may well turn out to be a tolerably accurate way of predicting human behavior (hence the move toward a ‘behavioral’ political ‘science’), but when extended to logic it can only cause trouble.

What is more, in ethics and politics such empirical/relational techniques may fail precisely on the basis of their intended usefulness. In reading the memoirs of the Earl of Clarendon, “we might on the basis of our understanding of the Earl’s character venture a prediction as to what would be likely to happen to him, or even as to the likelihood of his coming to a tragic end. But this would in no wise be on the order of a scientific prediction. In fact, it could not even be compared with a prediction as to the angle of refraction of a light ray, given the angle of incidence.” I don’t need to know what the light ray is in order to get good results in terms of predicting its behavior. To attempt to predict what became of the Earl by applying the scientific technique would likely lead nowhere. “It is precisely the virtue of properly scientific predictions that they can be made, and even ought to be made, in the absence of any knowledge of the ‘whats’ of the things in question,” but not so the Earl, or ourselves; for ethical and political purposes, including predictions, we need very much to know what sort of person he, and we, are. “However irrelevant the intelligibility of a what-logic may be for scientific purposes, it is not therefore necessarily irrelevant for all purposes.” Indeed, “there are certain kinds of questions which a context-logic is in principle incapable of providing answers to, and a kind of intelligibility in respect to which only a what-logic can give satisfaction.”

Veatch disposes of the historicist objection to ‘what-logic’: that it is “the result of nothing more than a historical accident, viz., that the basic sentence form of Indo-European languages just happened to be of a structure not unlike that of subject-predicate.” In the half-century since Veatch wrote, we know that in fact thinkers in non-Indo-European languages taught themselves to reason, too, but Veatch addresses the matter in principle, observing that “there is no reason to suppose that there might not be any number of alternative ways of symbolizing the form or structure of the logical tool that comes into play whenever we attempt to understand things for what they are.” If we find one, good. And Aristotle’s writings themselves “came to be transmitted to the Latin west” through Arabic-speakers; “Arabic is not an Indo-European language” and in fact lacks “a subject-predicate form of sentence structure.”

What is the subject-predicate relation, exactly? It is “one in which the subject term in the statement stands for what we are talking about, or are concerned to know about, and the predicate signifies what we take such a subject to be, or what in our judgment it is.” Within this definition there is room for subdivisions: genus (Socrates is an animal); differentia (Socrates is rational); species (Socrates is a man); property (Socrates is a language-user); and accident (Socrates is snub-nosed). To say “A modern logician is a human being” (a claim about ‘whatness’) doesn’t mean the same thing as to say “If x is a modern logician, then he is a human being” because the modern logician in question might be an angel or a demon. What-logic requires you to know the subject-matter, whereas the relating-logic works with letters or symbols. Thus Kant defines an “analytic judgment” as one in which “the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is covertly contained in this concept.” Modern analytic logic ‘abstracts’ from being, effectively unpacking one side of the sentence in the other side of it—it expresses a necessity, and very nearly a tautology. To say “All bodies are extended” is merely to say that the notion of extension is contained in the notion of body. Further, “if such a necessary truth, supposedly about extended bodies” (or whatever else), “is not dependent upon our knowing anything at all about such bodies, then surely cannot be a truth about extended bodies.” If, by contrast, we take “All bodies are extended” as a what-statement, then we are talking about “the very nature of such bodies” as objects in the physical world that we are seeking to know.

“The challenge which the notion of analytic truth poses for a what-logic is not simply that of an alternative logic. Rather, the decisive challenge lies in the fact that the proponents of analytic truths invariably assume that what-statements are nothing but analytic, that they are directly and properly reducible to analytic truths indeed, that there are no proper what-statements at all, and hence no such thing as a what-logic of any kind.” The challenge, Veatch argues, rests on a non sequitur. To speak abstractly, to speak of concepts, is to speak ambiguously. A ‘concept’ might mean an “idea or concept in the mind which means or signifies something other than itself” or “that which is thus conceived or mean or signified, i.e., the object that is so meant or conceived.” There is no logical reason to suppose that a true statement about the notion necessarily amounts to a true statement about the thing. “What could ever have possessed Kant, not to mention almost the entire company of contemporary analytic philosophers, to have supposed that because a truth was a necessary truth, in the sense that its denial would be self-contradictory, it could not therefore possibly be a truth about the world?” They “commit the fallacy of confusing use with mention.” The distinction between objects and concepts of objects remains “a necessary and inescapable distinction.”

“Things are what they are,” and “our knowledge and understanding of things can ultimately come only though a recognition of this.” Put differently, “it might simply be said that nothing can be or exist without being something,” without being something “necessarily, and not just contingently.” Much-decried ‘essentialism’ is, well, essential to human thought. A figure said to be a triangle either is or is not one, and to suppose otherwise is to contradict oneself—never a sound move in logic. Further, “what-statements being assertions about the world rather than simply about words or concepts, it is clear that what gets analyzed in such a statement is no mere concept, but rather the thing or entity which that concept is a concept of, or to which it ‘refers,’ to use Kant’s term.” Truth-statements stated in what-logic might turn out to be false; ‘man is a rational animal’ might be right or wrong, in terms of what man is. Truth-statements stated in relating-logic cannot be false, because in that case ‘man is a rational animal’ means that ‘rational animal’ is already packed into the concept, ‘man.’

Veatch hastens to add that none of this means that modern relating-logic has no place—that it is an illegitimate path for the human mind to walk. What-statements “must be subject to a dual criterion, so far as the conditions of their truth are concerned”: first, are they coherent analytically; second, are they consistent with our experience in the world. “We have only to step outside the philosophy classroom and into the open air of everyday human existence to realize that the things and events of the world are what they are necessarily and self-evidently; but for us to know what motion is, or what hydrogen is, or what the color red is, or what we ourselves as human beings are, we can do no other than accept the tutelage of experience, both in its initial promptings and in its continuing corrections.”

Although relating-logic does have an important place in philosophy, because it now enjoys dominance among academic philosophers Veatch devotes a chapter to its “exigencies and disabilities.” “What must the enterprise of human knowledge and understanding be like, so long as one restricts oneself simply to the instruments and devices of a relating-logic and solemnly forswears the use of what-statements altogether?” Wittgenstein sets down the rule: “Grammar is autonomous and not dictated by reality.” It is pure convention. You enjoy absolute freedom to ‘define your terms,’ but, having defined them, the analyst must stick strictly to unpacking what he, or perhaps his society, has loaded into them. If I define ‘planet’ as an object moving in a circular orbit, that’s it. In relating-logic, “it is not merely the relation of things to other things that is the means of their being known and understood, but rather our human convention whereby things are related to other things that are the resource of knowledge.”; “all necessary connections are confined exclusively to the sphere of the linguistic and the logical,” “represent[ing] only our human devices for relating and connecting things, and not any real connections or relations in things themselves.” This radicalizes Hume, who “was at least concerned about necessities in fact.” Relating-logic suspects that “people, in thinking they are talking about real necessities or real impossibilities in things, may in fact be talking only about rules for the use of certain words.”

This, Veatch counter-argues, exemplifies “the fallacy of inverted intentionality.” He means that “a statement of first intention is construed as a statement of second intention; and yet the condition of the second intention is that the statement of the first intention be taken at face value.” For example, to say, as one analytic philosopher does, that the statement, ‘a thing cannot be red and green at the same time’ “is but a veiled grammatical rule for the use of ‘red’ and ‘green'” is to invert the intention of pointing out such a contradiction. ‘Red’ and ‘green’ have no meaning aside from their meaning in the real world, unless one assigns a purely arbitrary definition to those terms. To do that would be to make it seem “as if the very forces of nature had been drained of their force.” If, as Wittgenstein asserts, “meaning simply is use,” use in language only, “determined by our grammatical rules,” then logicians have disqualified logic from participation in science—that is, science understood as the attempt to gain knowledge of the world and/or (in modernity) to gain effective means of controlling the world. “The question is how a logic which cannot serve as a means either of description or of explanation can possibly be considered as an organon or as an instrument of knowledge and understanding.” Such a logic, Veatch allows, “can perhaps be of some slight use and value” in science. Here he has recourse to remarks by philosopher of science Ernest Nagel, who argues that even if we could perceive molecules (for example), “molecular theory would still continue to formulate the traits of molecules in relational terms”—that is, “in terms of relations of molecules to other molecules and to other things” and “not in terms of any of their qualities that might be directly apprehended through our organs of sense”—in order to allow scientists to understand and to predict “the occurrence of events and the relations of their interdependence in terms of pervasive structural patterns into which they enter.” Insofar as scientists direct their study at understanding relations, relating-logic makes sense, since in effect the ‘game’ they are investigating is really a pattern in nature; if it were not, if it were merely a verbal construct, a grammar, then it could not predict anything in the real world, but would lead only to conclusions about our own arbitrary or conventional concepts.

What, then, should the status of ‘what-logic’ be? After all, “the very idea that a knowledge of essences is possible is enough to inflame all the right-thinking, right-minded philosophers of this world.” “With this we are brought face to face with both Hume and Kant.”

To say that “each thing is what it is and therefore has its proper nature or essence or character,” is to say something that “holds only if the thing in question is truly one thing or one being.” The worry that we can’t be sure if we are contemplating a thing that has an essence bothers them in a way that it doesn’t bother (for example) Aristotle. Aristotle is comfortable with a “frank recognition of fallibilism” in our attempts to understand nature. Hume and Kant, by contrast, claim that the everyday world “is not, strictly speaking, given to us as such in experience” but rather “must be in some way or another either inferred from or constituted out of what is given.” Veatch replies, why assume so? Why assume that human understanding infers, or orders, or even constructs and fabricates what it takes to be reality” “Why should not its primary role be, rather, one of apprehension and description?” Why should it not be what it seems to be? This turns epistemological skepticism back on itself. This leaves room both for ‘common sense’ and for error.

So, when Bertrand Russell tells us that when we see a man walking down the street, all we ‘really’ see are “patches of color arranged in various patterns and succeeding one another in various ways,” there must be “something amiss” in his assertion. He has confused “an epistemological ultimate with an ontological or metaphysical ultimate.” “Just because I can be sure that a certain sense datum exists even when I can’t be sure about anything else, does it follow that such a datum can exist without anything else?” It does not follow; it is “a non sequitur.” Similarly, when Hume denies the principle of causation as a logical necessity, he elevates the correct logical denial of the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc beyond its pay grade. If something that didn’t exist suddenly did, would we not rather think that “there must be some reason or cause for its having done so.” “Written on the very face of any contingent event or happening is its very dependence on at least some outside cause or causes.” And so “while Hume may have awakened Kant from certain of his dogmatic slumbers, he at the same time lulled him into still others.” As an aside, one might wonder if the intervention of Christianity between Aristotle’s time and Hume’s (and earlier, Descartes’s) may have so raised the stakes respecting the need for certainty in knowledge that it induced modern philosophers to raise the epistemological bar too high, to claim that philosophic ‘method’ could deliver surer results than the Holy Spirit Himself. But I digress.

The radical character of relating-logic brought Karl Popper to the conclusion that Newton himself was mistaken in supposing that his theory could in any way have been derived logically from his observations. Einstein concurred, calling “the fundamentals of scientific theory” “purely fictitious,” “free inventions of the human mind,” not abstractions from experience at all. Veatch comments, “What we observe here is the phenomenon of a what-logic being displaced by a relating-logic,” a denial that induction of causes and effects from the nature of objects is logical. According to Hume and his philosophic progeny, “since full-bodied objects like apples are never given in experience, then it is clearly impossible that from repeated experiences of objects like these one could ever by a process of induction arrive at a knowledge of what such objects are.” Induction can only be deployed in the attempt “to relate things to others as ’causes’ and ‘effects,’ rather than to lead to an understanding of what they are in their very natures,” or from those very natures.

Kant takes the logical next step. If “the given data of experience do not come to us in intelligible patterns,” and if no such patterns can be “abstracted or deduced from the presented data,” then “the order of nature” doesn’t disclose “nature in itself but rather an order which we human beings bestow upon and endow nature with.” Veatch calls this the “foundation stone of almost the entire edifice of contemporary philosophy of science.” Moreover, as “free creations and inventions of the human mind” the categories “through which we order our world and thus render it intelligible” as a ‘world’ “are held to be variable and subject to change, one set being used at one time and in one age, perhaps, and another at a different time and in a different age.” Here historicism, the philosophic doctrine of the historicity of reality, begins. Ptolomaic astronomy and Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics, are only “different ways of organizing the data of our experience to make them fit into a particular ordered pattern of a universe,” the ordered pattern itself being both conventional and changeable over time. In politics (one might note) this enables Kant to imagine that his wish for perpetual peace might be instantiated. If historicism is true, why not? The authors of The Federalist would have replied that human nature likely prevents such a “visionary” scheme. But now human nature is out the window.

Veatch makes a further, and crucial point. One way to avoid “falling into the fallacy of inverted intentionality” would be to renounce intentionality itself. In effect, this has been done by those forms of historicism that posit historical determinism. Just as extreme Calvinists reject human free will in favor of a providentialism ‘totalistically’ understood, so too do Marxists (for example) and ‘race theorists’ reject free will for ‘laws of History.’ Human intention is not only ineffectual but illusory, they contend. Similarly, literary scholars might deny that the intention of the author of a poem or a novel matters, that (most recently and radically) the reader should be free to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘re-imagine’ a literary work into whatever framework suits the current Zeitgeist. In 1969, literary studies had yet to become the morass they would soon be, but Veatch does see the effects of the critique of ‘what-logic’ in the visual arts. “It was reason,” the Surrealists charged, “that exercised its dictatorship upon men, forcing them to observe and abide by a supposed rational in things.” But according to the latest reasoners, “such order is not really there; it is only imposed by reason.” Therefore, “Let man free himself from this dictatorship of reason”; let Kantian Transcendentalism become frankly sur-real, a warrant for the valorization of dreams, intoxication—warrant for a madness that is the only true sanity, given reason’s suicide. The resulting “antics” have “never been reported of our revered contemporary logicians—not even of Bertrand Russell,” although here one might demur, in view of Lord Russell’s antic private and public lives if not of his academic work, which was more copious than idiosyncratic.

Returning to history, Veatch insists that at least there it seems that the distinction between what-logic and relating-logic needs to be retained, at least insofar as philosophers claim that historical laws exist. But this too faces challenge from Popper and others. Their critique aims at the establishment of such laws understood as scientific findings; the laws in question must be relational, not substantive. But why, Veatch asks, must historical explanation be scientific? “In our lives all of us derive, from history and from our everyday experience, a kind of knowledge and understanding” that amounts to practical wisdom, a “knowledge of the world in which the universal tends to be neither clearly articulated nor clearly exhibited” in the manner of, say, the law of gravity. Such knowledge, as Socrates came to see, forms “the source or seed-bed of philosophy and of all the humanities”; dialectical reasoning may correct it, but it can never begin anywhere else. You can get to a logically ‘cleaned-up’ understanding of the world through common-sense, through experience of the world, but never by eschewing such knowledge altogether. In this, Aristotle was right to make the phrase ‘political philosophy.’

From ‘history’ so understood one can derive ethical lessons from facts, pace Max Weber. The supposed fallacy of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’ simply registers the dominance of relating-logic over what-logic. “Why not say that the virtue and vice of human actions escape us, not because virtue and vice are not matters of fact, but rather because of the way we approach such actions the way we look at them,” Veatch writes, ending his sentence with a period and not a question mark. When we call so-and-so “a stuffed shirt or a pompous ass, just what do we mean by this, if not that he is quite obviously and as a matter of fact a rather poor specimen of a human being?” The judgment of so-and-so “turns entirely” on “a more basic judgment as to what man is and what it means to be human.” To put relating-logic to work for purposes of moral judgment commits us to the aforementioned fallacy of inverted intentionality.

Veatch concludes by observing that “with respect to the humanities, while our neo-analytic philosophy may concede them no end of value in terms of the aesthetic, and also perhaps the moral, uplift which those who cultivate them may experience, there must be no pretending that the pursuit of these disciplines can yield anything that in any proper sense may be called knowledge,” inasmuch as “in the context of a relating-logic all necessary connections involve only analytic truths and reflect nothing of the way things are in fact and in reality” but are “no more than devices or constructs of our own that enable us to get from one point to another in the cognitive process.” As would be seen in years following 1969, when Veatch wrote, what can be constructed can be deconstructed, completing the process of nihilism or indiscriminate ‘democratization’ of thought itself. Stronger souls will then take that opportunity to impose their own impassioned constructions upon others, thereby undermining social and political democracy in the name of social and political democracy.

Veatch hopes for a compromise, whereby relating-logic stays within the realm of scientific theory, if not practice, and what-logic rules everywhere else. Relations do matter in nature itself, and so relating-logic may help to clarify our thoughts respecting those relations, so long as its practitioners do not suppose that it means that such a logic refutes what-logic. When considering Newton’s apple and the gravitational law he once was imagined to have derived from its fall, “we do not have to suppose that the initial common-sense knowledge of apples from which we started out has now to be given up or considered outmoded.” Just as what-logic cannot tell us much about relations—it cannot discover the Second Law of Thermodynamics—so relating-logic cannot tell us much about ‘whatness.’ “Recognize the difference between the two logics and abide by it,” Veatch recommends. In philosophy (taking the example nearest to his heart), one wants to know “not just what man is but what the very nature of things is.” “What other instrument would do for this purpose than precisely something on the order of a what-logic?” Indeed, “what philosophy is competent to know as regards man and the nature of things is something that the sciences are totally and in principle incapable of granting.” Scientific knowledge is knowledge, but not “knowledge in any primary sense, much less the paradigm of knowledge.” We only suppose so because we confuse “social position with genuine merit,” the prestige of modern science with the actual science or knowledge it brings. This means that the logic espoused by those overly impressed with the results of modern science remains enmeshed in the conventions philosophers have intended to move beyond, whether in the Platonic ascent from the city or the Baconian critique of the idols.

 

 

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

 

Following Machiavelli’s adjuration to dominate Fortuna, Francis Bacon proposed the conquest of nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” an estate that his follower, Thomas Hobbes, would describe as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If, roughly speaking, the first step in this conquest was precise navigation, the second industrialism, the third electrification, the fourth the discovery and harnessing (more or less) of nuclear energy, the fifth information technology, then Conquest of Nature 6.0 is “gene editing,” the power to alter the genetic composition of living organisms. Eventually, this power will be used “to change the genome of our own species in ways that are hereditable, forever altering the genetic composition of humankind”—thereby “direct[ing] the evolution of our own species.” On the seventh ‘day,’ humanity will rest, inasmuch as human nature itself will become something else.

This is why so many of us hope for divine intervention, unconvinced as we are that ‘something else’ will necessarily be better. But to the book at hand….

Doudna and Sternberg are biochemists, and readers will see that they must be contemporary scientists of some sort when they read this sentence: “What will we, a fractious species whose members can’t agree on much, choose to do with this awesome power?” The answer is that the question is ill-formed: As a species, we won’t decide anything; there is no United States of the World to make such a decision. Decisions (plural) will be made by the regimes ruling the various countries whose scientists know how to do such things. The scientist’s classification of human beings as a species, while profoundly important, tells us little about how members of that species deliberate, choose, and act because modern science does not conceive of human beings as their distinguished predecessor, Aristotle, did: as political animals. It may be that modern scientists prefer some form of ‘species-being’ to be apolitical, not only ruled by persons wielding the ‘science of administration’ but by scientists wielding the power to transform fundamentally rulers and ruled alike. The authors here see that as a problem, but they see no solution beyond appealing to scientists worldwide to decelerate the research. It may well be that there is no solution; real politics, conducted under real regimes with real differences of opinion regarding what human nature is and what should be done with it, will permit no ‘global’ solution.

Until now, “the Homo sapiens genome has been shaped by the twin forces of random mutation and natural selection.” With the discovery of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick in 1953, biologists saw that living organisms have their own “secret language” or code, which “provides instructions to produce a particular protein inside the cell.” Ribonucleic acid (RNA) serves as the biochemical Apollo in this process, “transform[ing] the instructions contained in DNA into proteins.” “RNA acts as messenger, ferrying information from the nucleus, where the DNA is stored, to the outer regions of the cell, where proteins get produced.” “This overall flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is known as the central dogma of molecular biology, and it is the language used to communicate and express life.” The year 2001 saw not a space odyssey but the completion of an odyssey into the interior of human life, as scientists finished the Human Genome Project, which provided a comprehensive map of the genetic structure of our species.

Initially, scientists conceived of this knowledge as the pathway to the discovery of cures for hard-to-treat diseases and improved food sources. Doudna and Sternberg offer a clear account of advances in the field since the millennium, which have been substantial. Doudna has been a pioneer in the latest technology that enables the manipulation of genes, CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” “Clustered” means that certain ‘letters’ of DNA exist only in one part of the chromosome within a cell. The ‘letters’ are arrayed in a uniform pattern which is “nearly the same when read in either direction, just like a palindrome such as ‘senile felines.'” “I had never heard of DNA repeating itself with this kind of precision and uniformity, where every repetition was truly identical and always separated from its neighbor by a similarly sized, random spacer sequence,” Doudna recalls. If “every cell had a different CRISPR array due to the unique sequences interspaced between the repeats,” whereas “every other part of the DNA was nearly identical in each of these cells,” then the “CRISPRs were probably the fastest-evolving region in the genome,” the part of the cell that enabled the cell “to change or adapt quickly in response to something the cells encountered in their environment.” In a bacterium, for example, this rapid-response capacity enables the organism “to fight off viruses,” those banes of microbial existence, with “a warrior protein” that can “seek and destroy viral DNA.” They, and viruses, can also become immune to human-designed attacks by antibiotic and antiviral medications.

Thus in the space of fewer than two decades, microbiology “had advanced from a loose collection of interesting but inconclusive studies to a broad, unified theory about the inner workings of a microbial adaptive immune system.” If so, then in principle “the genome would become as malleable as a piece of literary prose at the mercy of an editor’s red pen.” This goes beyond mere editing to “genome engineering, a reflection of the supreme mastery that scientists held over genetic material inside living cells.” Scientists can now mutate cells or “destroy a gene’s ability to produce a functional protein”; they call the latter effect a “gene knockout,” a shutoff of the gene’s natural function. “Think of the cell as the largest symphony in the world, made up of more than twenty thousand different instruments. In a healthy, normal-functioning cell, the various symphonic voices are perfectly balanced; in malignant cancer cells or infected cells, the balance is disrupted, with some instruments playing too loud and others too soft.” But who or what is nature’s equivalent of Oscar Levant, playing all the instruments? Now, potentially, the microbiologists or biochemists, if “armed with the complete CRISPR toolkit.” “It often feels like the genome-engineering applications made possible by CRISPR are limited only by our collective imagination.” But, as someone famously asked, what do mean by ‘us’? After all, witty Oscar was also a bit daft. Who rules? And what for?

As Tocqueville would have predicted, given its “low cost and ease of use,” this technology will become democratized, making a “once-esoteric practice into a hobby or a craft, just like home-brewing beer”—which, the thirsty authors hasten to add, is already being done with the CRISPR “toolkit.” “The democratization of CRISPR will accelerate the process of research and development,” in turn “lead[ing] to uses of this technology that people are not yet prepared for,” “whose effects can’t be contained within the lab.” “With our mastery over the code of life comes a level of responsibility for which we, as individuals and as a species, are woefully unprepared.” ‘We’ will continue to be woefully unprepared if ‘we’ think of ourselves as individuals and species, and not also as regimes and states.

Doudna and Sternberg quite sensibly observe that human beings have exerted influence over the “evolutionary process” of organisms for centuries by artificial selection or breeding, as distinguished from natural selection. The roil over ‘genetically-altered’ foods does indeed seem a fuss over not much, since human beings have been doing it for a long time. The authors cite Luther Burbank’s 1901 statement averring that natural species are “as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or colors on the artist’s canvas, and can readily be molded into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.” Almost all foods have been so altered, obscuring the distinction between natural and unnatural. In this sense, gene editing only offers a much more precise way of effecting such alterations. Such alterations might be far from benign, inasmuch as “there’s no way to guarantee that this incredibly powerful tool won’t wind up in the hands of people who have no compunction about using gene drives to cause harm,” devising ‘gene bombs’ “to target the human microbiome or major food sources.”

Accordingly, the authors distinguish between two types of cells that can be ‘edited.’ Somatic cells are specific to an individual organism; gene editing might cure my genetically-induced disease (or, in the wrong hands, cause one). Their good or bad effects are limited to the organism whose cells are altered. Germ cells are “any cells whose genome can be inherited by subsequent generations.” Figuring out how to alter germ cells is harder than figuring out how to alter somatic cells, but it promises a much more elegant solution to the problem of disease, as “reversing a disease-causing mutation in a single human germ cell is much simpler than trying to do the same thing inside some of the fitty trillion somatic cells that make up a human body.” The task will be to get CRISPR into the body of the patient, “to the tissue where the disease is exerting its greatest effect”; scientists are working on that. But this only ratchets up the urgency of the ethical-political questions arising from the invention of this power. “Whether we’ll ever have the intellectual and moral capacity to guide our own genetic destiny is an open question.” Making “heritable changes to the human genome” should be resisted, the authors recommend, although it must be observed that their recommendation has not been followed. After all, why would the Chinese communist regime, in principle committed to the manipulation of human ‘evolution’ through political-economic revolution, wielding mass-slaughter of peasants as one of its weapons, halt at the use of a biological tool which offers a much less crude way of achieving the desired outcomes? Why not enforce communal equality by designing human beings capable of no other life than one of communal equality?

Somewhat comically, the authors’ principal worry seems to be that such a prospect might hurt the scientists, “set[ting] many members of the public against this fledgling technology despite its enormous potential for good.” As they more or less acknowledge, given the character of their regime, the Chinese rulers do not need to worry so much about public opinion, and so have directed their scientists to forge ahead. American intelligence agencies have already listed genome editing “as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America.” Leave it to the spooks to think politically, when the scientists would rather not.

What of religion as a source of possible constraints? The authors make short work of it. Religious “perspectives vary widely.” Christians often “regard the embryo as a person from conception,” while Jews and Muslims don’t. Since the human embryo is the most obvious site for germ-cell manipulation, such discrepancies could bring religious warfare back with higher-tech swords and scimitars.

Hemming and hawing somewhat, the authors begin to wonder, is it really a problem at all, however? There may be no principled constraints on such research. For example, “The argument that germline editing is somehow unnatural doesn’t carry much weight”; the distinction between natural and unnatural they judge “a false dichotomy, and if it prevents us from alleviating human suffering, it’s also a dangerous one.” (One might add that if, on the other hand, germline editing might elevate the status of some at the expense of the human suffering of others, that result might be dangerous, too.) Or what if (again, as Tocqueville would suggest) germline editing would elevate the status of some by alleviating the suffering of others—by anesthetizing them into a condition of dronelike docility without dronelike laziness? (“Timid and industrious herd animals,” in Tocqueville’s phrase.) The authors scramble to distinguish gene editing from eugenics, which has rightly taken on such a bad odor in recent decades, but what is gene editing but a more precise and reliable form of eugenics, a word that describes the aspirations of gene editors more accurately than any term gene editors have devised?

More radically, is the dichotomy between natural and unnatural false? In urging that it is, the authors ask if a coral reef, which is natural, really differs in any meaningful way from a “megalopolis like Tokyo,” a thing usually considered unnatural. The example is more complex than it seems, if human beings are by their nature political animals. If so, then in some respects Tokyo must be natural inasmuch as it’s a ‘polis,’ however ‘megalo’ it may be. The reason one balks at the claim is that the coral reef has no customs or conventions; it must be what it is, given the nature of the animals that built it. There is no such necessity about a megalopolis; whatever their size, political communities mix human nature—identifiably the same, everywhere—with habits, opinions, institutions that vary considerably from place to place, time to time. It makes sense to ask if a given political community is good for the human beings who inhabit it; it doesn’t make sense to ask if a given coral reef is good for the beings that inhabit it, unless some exogenous force—pollution, for example—has damaged it.

The authors finally approach the question of political regimes in the last ten pages of their book. They raise the question of justice. How would we edit genes “equitably—that is, in a way that improves human health across the board, not just in certain groups”? In the future, “people with more money” might “live healthier and longer lives thanks to their privileged sets of genes” and not merely because they can afford better health care. But, like all matters of distributive justice, the issue will be settled by the character of the regime in which it arises. This is why the authors raise a smile when they claim that “governments are simply not going to begin forcing parents to edit their children’s genes.” Really? Why not? Governments have been known to kill people because their genes were defective, or supposed to be. Why not wield the micro-scalpel instead of the truncheon?

And then there is the matter of foreign policy, which the authors do not neglect to remark. “Any prohibitions on germline gene editing in the United States would effectively cede leadership in this area to other nations—something Americans are arguably already doing with our existing bans on federal funding for germline editing,” which one suspects to be their primary concern in all of this. Indeed, “once a game-changing technology is unleashed on the world, it is impossible to contain it.” They end the book with a whine about how non-scientists don’t trust scientists, anymore. By the same token, one wonders why they trust their fellow scientists, especially those in the pay of foreign and hostile governments.

Are there natural limits to human efforts to manipulate natural limits? Evidently there are some, as seen in the use, and the non-use, of nuclear weapons. A technology that threatens to obliterate me if I use it to obliterate you, because you might use it against me in your dying moments, has yet to be used against any country that maintains a nuclear arsenal that might survive nuclear attack. Deterrence works. Similarly, although regimes might attempt to breed supermen, even enhance them with artificial intelligence and other powers, it seems unlikely that any regime would design such a ‘race’ of warriors without taking firm precautions against their rebellion. The main threat would be a regime that intends to transform the rulers themselves into such warriors, a regime animated by some notion of trans-humanity. Such regimes have already existed, but they’ve never had such powerful technological means at their disposal.