Becoming What We Deplore
Most people don't set out to be hypocrites -- yet time and again we discover that we've fallen into it without even realizing, and often are insisting that what we are doing is Different, and therefore doesn't constitute hypocrisy at all.
As I'm working on getting "Rockin' the USA" ready for release as a freestanding e-book, and preparing a bonus essay to go with it, I've been pondering just how American society in the Grissom timeline goes from the attitude immediately after the revelation of the various Cold War cloning and biotech programs, that they were definitely unethical and the scientists should be called to account, but the subjects should not be stigmatized or otherwise punished, to actively demanding mere decades later that all "Sharps" be marked out so they couldn't pass as normal people. And particularly this attitude appearing without shame or reproach in communities that had experienced stigmatization and even violent assault for being Other only a generation or two earlier.
Which made me consider just how some of the experiments could be perceived as assaults upon some of the most fundamental boundaries of just about every culture in the world, disrupting the proper ordering of the world in a way that would be frightening at a level many people would not even be aware of. So even while they agreed intellectually that the subjects of the unethical experiments, even ones like splicing cat DNA into humans for psi or creating ova from a man's stem cells in order to transmit his modified mitochondrial DNA into future generations, should not be stigmatized, people would feel revulsion at a gut level. So it would take only a few well-publicized incidents of unstable individuals with such mods doing something crazy for good people, even people in communities founded by people who'd survived one of the most horrific genocides of the modern era, to support (or at least become complicit through silence with) a call for "those people" to be marked out in some visible way.
Which suggests another reason to proceed with extreme caution with the application of biotech to humans, even for obviously beneficial medical reasons. Much as we like to think of ourselves as rational actors, we're often more driven by emotional reactions and then rationalize them as having followed rational rules.
As I'm working on getting "Rockin' the USA" ready for release as a freestanding e-book, and preparing a bonus essay to go with it, I've been pondering just how American society in the Grissom timeline goes from the attitude immediately after the revelation of the various Cold War cloning and biotech programs, that they were definitely unethical and the scientists should be called to account, but the subjects should not be stigmatized or otherwise punished, to actively demanding mere decades later that all "Sharps" be marked out so they couldn't pass as normal people. And particularly this attitude appearing without shame or reproach in communities that had experienced stigmatization and even violent assault for being Other only a generation or two earlier.
Which made me consider just how some of the experiments could be perceived as assaults upon some of the most fundamental boundaries of just about every culture in the world, disrupting the proper ordering of the world in a way that would be frightening at a level many people would not even be aware of. So even while they agreed intellectually that the subjects of the unethical experiments, even ones like splicing cat DNA into humans for psi or creating ova from a man's stem cells in order to transmit his modified mitochondrial DNA into future generations, should not be stigmatized, people would feel revulsion at a gut level. So it would take only a few well-publicized incidents of unstable individuals with such mods doing something crazy for good people, even people in communities founded by people who'd survived one of the most horrific genocides of the modern era, to support (or at least become complicit through silence with) a call for "those people" to be marked out in some visible way.
Which suggests another reason to proceed with extreme caution with the application of biotech to humans, even for obviously beneficial medical reasons. Much as we like to think of ourselves as rational actors, we're often more driven by emotional reactions and then rationalize them as having followed rational rules.