Man and Techno-man. - Review - book review

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.

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.

Since the new technology cannot supply its own moral values, D'Souza believes, absorbing the lessons of "good books" through traditional liberal education will be more important in the future than mastering the latest "high-tech" syllabi. So will persuading the public that modern capitalism depends on serving "the needs and desires of others," rather than "selfishness and greed," though this argument has been offered-with limited success-since long before the rise of "techno- affluence."

Above all, D'Souza suggests, we should stop trying to play God. Implicit (and in biotechnology, often explicit) in the ideas of what he calls the "techno-utopians" is a desire to do no less than to "remake other human beings and to redesign human nature." Yet such a notion is itself a rejection of human nature and a claim to power that is, D'Souza correctly notes, totalitarian. In her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley warned against such a usurpation of the divine prerogative. Though it will not make as good a movie, D'Souza's book does so too.

Whether this message is likely to be heeded, however, might be clearer if D'Souza had devoted more time to explaining what has happened to the real God in the world of today's scientists and technological entrepreneurs. Explaining that the creation of the modern state required the privatization of religion in order to promote commerce and science (a project that succeeded most notably in the United States), D'Souza performs the difficult feat of "finding values in an age of techno-affluence" with astonishingly little reference to matters of faith. Perhaps most of the scientists and entrepreneurs he encountered were so thoroughly secularized that religion has no appeal for them. But in the past, no small number of innovators acted in part from religious conviction. (John D. Rockefeller believed he had been put on earth to transform God's gift of crude oil into useful products.) If today's innovators do not, then the likelihood they would forbear from usurping His role would seem small.

Nor did D'Souza seem to find out much about the impact of other value- shaping institutions besides religion. Although he repeats Adam Smith's famous observations about the role of conscience-the "impartial spectator"-in restraining self-interest, he gives short shrift to those groups, often known collectively as "civil society," which we have come to think play a crucial role in developing it. Are those at the forefront of the new economy essentially lone wolves, free from ties to families, friends, professional societies, and trade associations? Or are they embedded in a web of meaningful relationships that may act as a brake on their experimental zeal, telling them when they may be going too far?

As D'Souza reports, many of the new entrepreneurs and inventors are troubled by the riches they have obtained and are thinking about being philanthropic at an early stage in their lives. This suggests, at least, that conscience remains alive, even in a world of "techno- affluence," though just what it entails remains hazy.

We have ample reason to believe that both religion and civil society exert less influence than they once did. But we also have signs of a revival of interest in them, especially among the young and well educated. How this cultural clash resolves itself will determine whether or not the inventors and entrepreneurs who are doing so much to usher in a new era of prosperity will bring a healthy sense of virtue as well.

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