Old Email Archive

digest 1997-03-15 #002



11:27 PM 3/14/97 -0800
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
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Date: 14 Mar 1997 08:51:52 -0800
From: Ned Muhovich 
Subject: Re: send in the clones
Joe--
I think you're right--most people would find a clone of themselves
pretty 
boring, even a diminishment of themselves.  I don't, however, think
that
would stop people from doing it, were cloning feasible.
To pick up on something Cynthia said, I don't think the situation would
be that "someone" would be deciding who got cloned.  Rather,
the most
likely scenario is that those who could afford it would be the market
for 
such a procedure.  And having market forces deciding who used this
technology isn't a particularly comforting thought to me.
But perhaps I'm just focussing on the Dark Side (sorry, too many
screenings of _Star Wars_).  Joe is probably right that cloning
technology would have benefits.  But along with those benefits I
suspect
we get evils we can't even imagine right now.
Ned
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Ned Muhovich                                         University of
Denver 
emuhovic@du.edu
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On Thu, 13 Mar 1997, Joseph Duemer wrote:
> Quoted from H-Nexa:
>
> As far as cloning people is concerned, surely someone will
> quickly realize how boring the earth will be with all the
> same people/person on it :-)  Besides, no one will ever
> agree on who to clone, so the argument will be immortal
> but probably never the person.
>       Cynthia
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Dr. Cynthia J. Hallett
>    challett@jax.inter.net
> ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
> Whoever undertakes to set him[her]self
> up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is
> shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
>                        -Albert Einstein
>
>
>
>
>
> Picking up on Cynthia Hallett's tone in her recent post re: cloning
to
> the H-nexa list, I'd like to suggest that whatever sort of ersatz
> immortality cloning might confer, that it would be a dull and
> pleasureless heaven. I know I run the risk of conflating sexual
> reproduction and sexual pleasure, but I would further suggest that
a
> world in which cloning is common will be a world of diminished
pleasure.
> A world in which the fine needle of technique pierces a little
further
> into the most private parts of the soul. This attitude can be
> caricatured, of course--the character of George at the beginning
of
> Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in his speech to the young
biologist,
> comes to mind. But George is not entirely wrong--the young
biologist
> turns out to be a cold prick. And technique fails, in the end, to
> satisfy.
>
>
> Joseph Duemer
>
>
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Date: 14 Mar 1997 20:31:42 -0800
From: Joseph Duemer 
Subject: Re: COMMENT: the trouble with clones(Alex Brown)
H-NEXA Editor Katherine B. Branstetter wrote:
>
> >From Alex Brown:browna@tp.ac.sg
> Date: 14th March 1997
>
> On Thu, 13 Mar 1997 "Dr. Cynthia J. Hallett" 
> commented:
Alex Brown Is one of the most literate & informed contributors to
this
list, but I must take exception to some details of his last post, if
not
to its spirit as a whole:
>
> Yet the intention and the investment required in both breeding and
> cloning is the USEFULNESS of the resulting creature. Otherwise
nobody
> will bother doing it and thus we wouldn't have to worry about it.
Usefulness will likely be the driving force behind the initial funding,
but VANITY will likely be the reason humans are cloned. Somebody will
have the money, and money talks.
Alex is right about DESIGN, almost:
> Unfortunately, given the quite natural human tendency for making
> mistakes, at some point, someone, somewhere will probably consider
it
> useful to have specifically-designed 'employees' with specific
> task-oriented characteristics for specific roles. This is, of
course the
> sci-fi scenario where we would flick through the genetic catalogue
and
> select the characteristics we need for our purposes. The combat
model?
> The Olympic model? The pleasure model? The Einstein model? The
Woody
> Allen model?
Later, he writes:
> (If we design the sex drive out of the > individual, (like a
biological frontal > lobotomy), we would no longer be > talking
about human beings, cloned or not.
> Complexity of behaviour and > motivation would be considerably
different, I imagine).
I think that if we design ANYTHING in or out of the individual we are
"no longer talking about human beings, cloned or not." As far
as I can
see, the [essence] of being human is that we are the result of
contingent pattern-making. (I have bracketed 'essence' for the benefit
of all my post-modernist friends and colleagues.) It is our
intervention
that counts here. Question: Is cloning itself an intervention?
> Is it all worth it? As an > insane corporation, in order to get
your
> money's worth, you would have to control not only the physical
> characteristics, but also get complete > control over the
behaviour
> of the individual. Quite simply one would
> have to lock the clone up in a very tightly-controlled and
programmed
> environment. It can be done, but is it worth it? After all,  these
> 'thoroughbreds' (in effect, biological robots) can only operate in
> highly predictable environments. Yet megalomania begets
megalomania,
> control requires more control and somewhere, sometime, someone is
going
> to try it.
While I'm usually--anarchist that I am at heart--sympathetic to
denunciations of corporate greed, Alex's scenario reads a little like
one of the lesser James Bond movies. I suspect that cloning would not
be
so much the province of corporations as oligarchs. Some rich bastard
down in Arkansas.
Finally, I think there was a post sometime recently that misread what
I'd said about cloning, pleasure, and boredom. It was Cynthia Hallett
who suggested cloning might be "useful" for environmental
purposes. But
I think that if our species reaches a point where it must clone other
beings--plants and animals--to rescue ourselves from the environmental
disasters we everyday inflict upon the planet . . . Well, we will have
outlived whatever "usefulness" we may have once had to the
biosphere.
Behind this judgement is the belief that we are a dangerous and
distructive species, and that evolution will grind us back into
bacteria
before long. A world in which cloning is used to cover up for our
distructive behavior would be a sort of Disneyland--Unreal City, a
wasteland, no matter what sorts of "happy consciousness" might
be
proposed about our  place in the order of things by those with
interests
in maintaining the simulacra. (Perhaps I have come round in the end to
agreeing w/ Alex about conspiracies.)
What I'm suggesting here is that taking an instrumentalist approach to
cloning leads to depravity.
Note to all my colleagues out there: I'll be away from my e-mail for a
week beginning 3.16, but I'm going to let my mailbox fill up & look
forward to any and all responses. I especially want to thank those
disgruntled science-types over on SLS for getting this very interesting
ball rolling. This is what H-Nexa and SLS are all about!
- --
- --
Joseph Duemer
School of Liberal Arts
Clarkson University
Potsdam NY 13699
315-262-2466
"Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial,
but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to
mistake it for a universal one."
-- Hannah Arendt
"People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so
pleased with bad."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson