William M. Briggs

Post’s original title: Feminization continues apace: Wall Street Journal edition

The old joke has been modified: A sweater is a garment a citizen puts on when the government gets cold. Used to be child-mother. It still is, only the State has become our mother. And it has done so at our request.

The snowstorm Nemo—that it was given a name is another symptom of our decadence—dropped gently eight full inches of snow on New York City. This is not a lot. It was and is a weekly event in the near infrastructureless town in which I spent my formative years (tiny Gaylord, Michigan). Blasting through a foot of the freshly fallen stuff in a four-on-the-floor Chevy Chevette was not thought remarkable.

It was once not noteworthy in the larger town I moved to, either. As few as ten years ago, a snowfall this size would occasion nothing more than a radio announcement, “Alternate side parking suspended tomorrow.” Now we have salaried, pensioned, probably sober government officials running to the microphone before inclement weather telling us to “dress in layers.” Put on a sweater, I’m cold. Nanny-in-Chief Mike Bloomberg solemnly warned, “Do not go out. You might slip and fall in traffic.” I wish I were kidding.

Yesterday’s routine, predictable, even pretty normal winter event caused the Wall Street Journal to trumpet this headline:

Blizzard Resurrects Sandy Anxiety

Gas Lines Lengthen, Residents Stock Up as Storm Disrupts Roads, Rail, Flights

Were they talking about the handful of folks still living without heat down by the ocean, who understandably would not appreciate a layer of insulative snow on their roofs? No, sir, they were not. They were discussing New York residents in general, some of whom became anxious and rubbed their hands together fretfully. And why shouldn’t they? The storm had been trumpeted for forty-eight hours as “possibly deadly”, “historic”, “powerful”, “Get out and shop now before it’s too late!” People did:

Moe Akar, a co-owner of an Exxon station in Bloomfield, N.J., said he had run out of all grades of gas by noon Friday and experienced about double the pump volume as normal.

“People got scared,” he said.

On top of all this, flights were canceled. Trains, too. People, in no danger of losing their lives, had to wait. Why doesn’t the government do something? The phones of therapists began to ring.

But no calls came from the Starr household. They sat out the storm, hunkered in their “weekly family meeting.” What was on the agenda? “[E]veryday family issues.” Before these sedative conclaves, Mrs (if we’re still allowed that honorific) Starr said, “We were living in complete chaos.”

Like many parents, the Starrs were trapped between the smooth-running household they aspired to have and the exhausting, earsplitting one they actually lived in. “I was trying the whole ‘love them and everything will work out’ philosophy,” she said, “but it wasn’t working. ‘For the love of God,’ I finally said, ‘I can’t take this any more.'”

As dad Bruth said, “Having weekly family meetings increased communication, improved productivity, lowered stress and made everyone much happier to be part of the family team.” Perhaps confused by these strange words, the WSJ reporter wrote, “The past few years have seen a rapid erosion of the wall that once divided work and family…A new generation of parents is now taking solutions from the workplace and transferring them home.”

Family meetings used to be called “dinner.” Things change. My dad’s idea of increasing productivity was to hand me a sledge and wedge and tell me to split more wood. No wood, no heat. There wasn’t then a government program to deliver logs. There probably is now. And there’s probably another to regulate the process or yet one more to fine you for generating “flue pollutants.”

The last full-page headline of today’s paper (each of today’s headlines topped a different section) was a lament by a female named Rachel Dodes and her “nerve-racking, soul-searching, exhilarating process of Shopping for a Handbag.” Poor thing, for months she has “been carrying a decidedly unglamorous bag to work.” “Nobody,” she said, “likes it.”

We learn Rachael has spent “countless hours looking at images of bags online”, none of which were acceptable. Which explains why she then began “wallowing in a shame spiral for spending so much time thinking about something as inconsequential as a sack in which to stuff my sorries.”

Luckily our heroine learned she wasn’t alone and that other females felt as she did. We hear from many of these ladies. We commiserate with their woes. There may have been tears.

They were from me.

Today’s discovery is yet another academic with the map to Utopia glistening in his mind’s eye. David DeGrazia of George Washington University, author of the peer-reviewed paper “Moral enhancement, freedom, and what we (should) value in moral behaviour” in the Journal of Medical Ethics, is certain sure perfection can be reached if we could cull the immoral from the herd.

Why? “[B]ecause there is such an abundance of immoral behaviour” and “because the status quo of moral behaviour is deeply problematic and traditional means of moral enhancement may prove inadequate to achieve needed improvements”. Prominent immorality examples are slavery and prostitution, but also grievous “harms and injustices” such as “lack of access to safe water” and the USA’s failing to donate more than “1% of its Gross Domestic Product to foreign assistance”. Perhaps applying the exciting new techniques of moral enhancement can treble this amount?

DeGrazia, coiner of the phrase “post-person”, often erupts into enthusiasm and speaks in italics: “Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings.”

What is an “enhancement”?

Enhancements are understood as interventions designed to improve human form or function without responding to genuine medical need…

I will here define ‘enhancement’ as any deliberate intervention that aims to improve an existing capacity, select for a desired capacity, or create a new capacity in a human being. This covers…music lessons and…embryo selection.

He’s most keen on “moral bioenhancements”, “such as our capacities for sympathy and fairness.” He doesn’t merely tout “explicit instruction and consciousness-raising groups”, he’s angling for “non-traditional means of moral enhancement” such as drugs, surgery, and eugenics.

Exemplars of medical augmentation: “Glucose as a means of increasing resistance to temptation to do something wrong”, SSRIs for everything, “Propranolol as a means of decreasing unconscious racial bias”, zapping brains to reduce aggression (frying synapses calms).

Then eugenics:

• Selection of embryos that contain a gene coding for a greater disposition to altruism
• Genetic interventions to gametes, embryos or postnatal human beings as a means to the same end
• Embryo selection or genetic engineering as a means of avoiding or neutralising genes associated with antisocial personality disorder
• Either of these means as a way of securing a stronger predisposition to fairness
• An artificial chromosome that includes multiple genes coding for stronger predispositions to a variety of moral virtues

Fiddling with genes via selective abortion might work— it’s the same method farmers use to control stock—if we could unambiguously define moral behavior. Here DeGrazia concedes views differ. Some say morality means “strong partiality towards members of one’s own community” and freedom of religion. Others push for an “acceptance of a government” to meet unmet needs and for a “rejection of traditions and mores that seem regressive”. So do we abort kids who’d have a propensity to watch Fox News and allow only NPR listeners?

Who’ll be in charge of the killing of the substandard, parents or the State? Our tenured professor says, “it might make sense to permit parents to adopt more debatable visions of morality—among reasonable alternatives”. Parents would be given a menu of permissible traits—blue eyes or brown, say—but deviations would not be countenanced.

The hit list includes those whose genetics point towards “moral cynicism”, such as tax cheats, those not wanting to contribute “one’s fair share”, those with “defective empathy”, and those who suffer “a failure of insight or motivation”. Malcontents such as those unwilling “to find common ground” or with “Weak will[s] or susceptibility to temptation”, and the morons with an “Inability to find creative solutions to difficult problems involving competing interests and values” or an “Inability to grasp subtle, complicated details” also get flushed down the toilet.

Enough. The key fallacy in DeGrazia’s perfervid argument is that genes are responsible for all behavior. That some genes influence some behavior is true; that genes provide a crude blueprint for us, the platform where behaviors are created, is also true. But it is false that genes control all growth and development. If genes were responsible for all behavior then all identical twins would act identically. Identical twins raised apart are often found to be particularly different. Therefore any scheme which kills those with “substandard” genes must fail because of that and because it is impossible to unambiguously measure which genes control which behavior. Does anyone this side of sanity believe there is a gene or genes which causes an “Inability to find creative solutions to difficult problems involving competing interests and values”? Or that can predict tax cheats? But hey, if we expunge the gene for Y chromosomes we could almost eliminate violence!

It’s not unlikely that high self-esteem “experts” will believe they have found the gene(s) to control unwanted behavior, though. What a curious world it will be when they are given the power to implement their schemes.

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HT to Wesley J. Smith where I first learned about DeGrazia’s derangements.

Announcement David Theroux of the Independent Institute tells us “Philosopher Alvin Plantinga Receives Prestigious Rescher Prize.”