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Man and Techno-man. - Review - book review

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by Leslie Lenkowsky

The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence, by Dinesh D'Souza (Free Press, 284 pp., $26)

Last August, Jack and Lisa Nash of Englewood, Colo., brought into the world a new son, Adam. As with his Biblical namesake, the birth of this Adam marked a milestone in human history. For he was conceived in a laboratory dish in order to provide disease-free blood cells for his sister, Molly, who was suffering from a rare and deadly form of anemia. Before implanting him in his mother's womb, the parents rejected several other embryos that, it was discovered, carried genes for the disease too. The embryo that became Adam did not, and he thus became the first person brought into the world because his parents not only desired another child, but also wanted some of his "parts," as a commentator put it.

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But if Dinesh D'Souza is right, Adam will not be the last. Just as he once did with the nation's colleges and universities in the bestselling Illiberal Education, D'Souza, a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, explores in his new book a world that on the outside looks to be prosperous and dynamic, but is in fact morally challenged: the world of high-technology inventors and entrepreneurs whose efforts are not just reshaping the nation's economy, but-more profoundly-the conditions of human existence. While he finds much to like about their accomplishments, he is bothered by their inability to understand and articulate the values guiding them, or, in many cases, to recognize that their skills may be taking them (and us) into ethically dubious waters.

The booming biotechnology sector provides the foremost example of how the advances we are making could reap more evil than good. "Once scientists have mastered the workings of genes," D'Souza writes, "they will, for the first time, possess a new kind of power": They will be able not just to "design and custom-order" children (as the Nashes did), but also to change the human species itself. "Some visionaries of the high-tech world," D'Souza informs us, even see the potential for merging man and his machines, thereby transforming what it means to be alive.

And that's not all. The new technology-driven economy, claim its critics (whom D'Souza lumps together as the "Party of Nah"), threatens the environment by increasing human capacity to exploit "nature and natural resources." It weakens the bonds of community by substituting "virtual connections" for real ones, information for knowledge, and sensation for aesthetic experience. Not least importantly, it exacerbates feelings of unfairness, as those who develop the new technologies are rewarded with incomprehensibly vast sums of money for seemingly little effort.

Against such accusations stands what D'Souza labels the "Party of Yeah," the innovators themselves and their intellectual allies, such as George Gilder and Freeman Dyson. To them, the tech world is one of utopian promise, not peril. Biotechnology, they contend, offers hope for curing ailments long thought beyond treatment. Far from degrading the environment, high-tech agriculture can help conserve it by reducing the amount of land needed for growing food. As the Internet expands, it will create "electronic neighborhoods," crossing geographic and cultural boundaries and rooted in shared interests. And the riches the new economy generates, the "Party of Yeah" claims, will benefit not just those who command its heights, but also the rest of the world through more jobs, higher incomes, greater conveniences, and increasingly generous philanthropy.

D'Souza appears to be more inclined toward this optimistic prognosis, but does not shy away from the moral problems that come in its wake. Carried to extremes, he observes, biotechnology is dehumanizing, treating people as objects to be manipulated rather than fellow beings to be respected. While he agrees that high-tech entrepreneurs deserve the financial rewards the economy provides, "short-term inequalities of a certain magnitude," he cautiously writes, "disturb the social conscience, and they should." Indeed, even for the prosperous, money does not buy happiness, which requires the kind of meaningful life that the "virtual communities" of "techno-affluence" are hard-pressed to supply. Ultimately, the success of modern science, D'Souza concludes, may leave us more beholden to "nature"-a thoroughly reengineered version, of course-than the master of it, just the opposite of what modern science set out to do.

However, after having skillfully illuminated the ethical quandaries of the new prosperity, about all D'Souza has to say in response is that we must learn how to cope with them. Since equalizing opportunities for children is unrealistic in a world with large differences in income and wealth, we should worry more, he writes, about providing equal "rights" to get ahead, whatever that might mean in practice. Rather than trying nostalgically to recreate yesterday's wholesome communities, D'Souza adds, we should recognize how the "Information Revolution" is undoing the social damage of the "Industrial Revolution," such as by enabling some of us to spend our working hours at home instead of the factory.

Man and Techno-man. - Review - book review

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by Leslie Lenkowsky

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