Eden is in Western myth the unchanging and pristine paradise, lost through overreaching and lamented ever since. In the biblical story, however, Eden is more complicated. It is a living, growing place whose life depends on water and human labor. God plants the garden only after he has created man from the ground, and he charges Adam to work and keep the garden: to both improve and preserve it. Humanity is to be the source of both change and stability. Adam is part of nature—his very name springs from the earth, h'adamah—yet he is also distinct from it.
Of course, no sooner has God created man, animals, and woman than the creator loses control of his creation. Genesis is the original Frankenstein myth. That man and nature could defy God has provoked theologians for centuries. We can leave the theological puzzles aside, however. Genesis suggests truths that do not depend on a particular religious tradition: Even in Eden, humanity occupies a garden, a place between static order and wild nature, a place we both work and keep. And no creation is completely under its creator's control. The world changes almost as soon as it is formed, and so does humanity. They change each other.
Yet the ideal of the untouched paradise, of orderly nature undisturbed by human action, still shimmers in many imaginations. Nature is a source of moral authority for some, of security for others. It offers standards and models. It is autonomous and eternal. "The chief lesson is that the world displays a lovely order, an order comforting in its intricacy," writes Bill McKibben in his best-selling book, The End of Nature. "And the most appealing part of this harmony, perhaps, is its permanence—the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever, and branches reaching forward just as far." Throughout its long history, this image suggests, nature has not really changed. Its harmony and order are permanent, reminders of the beauty of stasis.
Changeless nature is not just a matter of utopian dreams. Those who seek stasis in the human world argue that they are following nature's way, that dynamism is not merely disruptive but unnatural. "The characteristic that best distinguishes flourishing ecosystems is never growth, but rather stability (a conservative virtue in its own right)," writes John Gray, the British philosopher, in his appeal for conservatives and greens to join forces. "This is a truth which is acknowledged in the discipline of ecology in all of its varieties....Modernist political faiths which advocate the unlimited growth of population, production and knowledge...are effectively in rebellion against every truth we have established about order in the natural world" (emphasis added.) The open-ended future of discovery and learning is not merely disruptive but downright perverse. The infinite series, Gray maintains, defies the natural order of things.
Clearly, how we think about nature—and about artifice—informs how we think about the growth and evolution of human societies. If what is given by nature is good by definition, then to change it is evil. If nature supplies patterns, distinctions, boundaries, and essences for us to respect, then recombinations are immoral or dangerous. If stasis is the highest form of biological nature, then perhaps it is also the highest form of human society. If human beings and human work are fundamentally unnatural, set apart from the rest of the world, then we must choose either all-out war against nature or separation from it—destruction or quarantine.
If, however, nature is itself a dynamic process rather than a static end, then there is no single form of "the natural." An evolving, open-ended nature may impose practical constraints, but it cannot dictate eternal standards. It cannot determine what is good. If human beings, human work, human purposes, and human imagination are part of nature in some significant way, then neither destruction nor quarantine is an option. The distinction between the artificial and the natural must lie not in their source—human or not—but in their characteristics, in the way they relate to the world around them.
"Certain phenomena are 'artificial' in a very specific sense: they are as they are only because of a system's being molded, by goals or purposes, to the environment in which it lives," writes Herbert Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial, which seeks to give such fields as engineering, architecture, design, and administration the same sort of status and theoretical grounding that the natural sciences have. Artifice implies design, goals, external purposes. It requires control. Even the artifacts of non-human creatures, from wasp nests and beaver dams to the moistened sticks chimpanzees use to dig out termites, all extend their designers' control over the environment. Human artifacts, writes Simon, "are what they are in order to satisfy man's desires to fly or to eat well. As man's aims change, so too do his artifacts—and vice versa."
But artifice does not offer complete control. Simon notes that "those things we call artifacts are not apart from nature. They have no dispensation to ignore or violate natural law." The artificial and the natural are bound together: The artificial serves its creators' purposes, subject to the limits of nature.
The natural, by contrast, does not require purposes. It simply is. Nature, lacking intent, is amoral. And natural systems are out of control. Purposeless, undirected behavior is characteristic not only of ecosystems, weather patterns, or tectonic plates but of undesigned human systems, such as languages. English grammar is not more or less moral than Chinese; it simply is. And while linguists and copy editors may study or trim a language, as a gardener tends plants, no one can control the system as a whole. It is constantly evolving.
Natural systems often evolve from the purposeful activities of their members, however. Birds pick wild strawberries and excrete their seeds, making it more likely that the sweeter, redder berries that attract birds will reproduce. That natural selection has nothing to do with the birds' purposes and is not under their control. Squirrels bury acorns, encouraging the evolution of oak trees that produce nuts of a size and shape particularly appealing to squirrels. The animals' actions must fit within the broader biological system, but they also affect its future direction.
This relation between decentralized actions and the natural systems that encompass them is even more apparent in the human world: When someone coins a word to capture a new attitude, invention, or idea, the new term must fit into the broader language, over which the word's creator has no control. And the new word affects the future evolution of the language. The same is true for an entrepreneur with a new product: He can directly control only his immediate economic environment (and even there his control is partial), not the economy as a vast, complex, natural system. But his success or failure will have ripple effects. Through such consequences, artifice is continually creating nature: generating new patterns and systems beyond anyone's control.
The tension between the natural and the artificial is a subject as old as philosophy or science, but the industrializing world of the late-18th and 19th centuries was famously obsessed with the question. We have inherited its romantic culture—a suspicion of nature tamed—as much as its technological arts and technocratic government. The romantics set emotion in opposition to reason, nature against artifice, humanity against technology. To preserve nature's purity, they recommended the quarantine of the human mind. That has never been a choice we could truly accept. It denies the fundamental links between body and mind, humanity and nature. In the name of authenticity, the romantic ideal counsels passivity and fatalism.
"As a 19th-century position, romanticism never broke with rationalism: rather, it was rationalism's mirror-image," writes the historian and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin.
Descartes exalted a capacity for formal rationality and logical calculation as the supremely 'mental' thing in human nature, at the expense of emotional experience, which is a regrettable by-product of our bodily natures. From Wordsworth or Goethe on, romantic poets and novelists tilted the other way: human life that is ruled by calculative reason alone is scarcely worth living, and nobility attaches to a readiness to surrender to the experience of deep emotions. This is not a position that transcends 17th-century dualism: rather, it accepts dualism, but votes for the opposite side of every dichotomy.
We have lived with this uneasy dichotomy for a century or more, alternatively believing one side then the other. It has never really suited us. It has never given us a satisfactory balance between body and mind, the natural and the artificial.
Understanding the relation between the natural and the artificial has recently assumed increasing urgency. Ours is, more and more, a biological era: an age defined by its insights into and power over the stuff of life itself. We are self-consciously, and quite literally, creating nature. How we understand what that creation means will determine much about our future. We must either choose between the rationalists and romantics—or their technocratic and reactionary derivatives—or we must find a different way.
So let us return to the garden. In The End of Nature, McKibben muses about the meaning of the greenhouse effect, which he argues has so transformed the atmosphere as to replace autonomous "nature" with a completely man-made world: "The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined....We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden." It is a striking line, adopted even by negative reviewers. And it is quite peculiar. McKibben misses the obvious: Gardens themselves are human creations, which organize and rearrange nature. Natural processes continue in the garden—not everything is under the gardener's control—but those processes are channeled to human ends; in a garden, the natural is mixed with the artificial. Our very view of nature "sweet and wild" assumes human influence.
The artificiality of gardens was in fact the subject of much poetry in the English Renaissance, an age as concerned as our own with the relation between nature and artifice. In Andrew Marvell's "The Mower Against Gardens," for instance, the narrator is a veritable 17th-century Jeremy Rifkin, upset with the innovation that creates unnaturally colored flowers and trees without parents:
With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint,
And Flow'rs themselves were taught to paint.
The Tulip, white, did for complexion seek;
And learn'd to interline its cheek:...
No Plant now knew the Stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the Wild the Tame;...
And in the Cherry he does Nature vex,
To procreate without a Sex.
Like the crossbreeding that produces tulips streaked with color, grafting is highly "unnatural," a high-tech process that was extremely difficult to discover and to master. We take grafting for granted only because we are used to it: Every vineyard is a colony of clones; every rose garden, cherry orchard, and bougainvillea-strewn trellis is artificial. In modern nurseries, plants regularly "procreate without a Sex."
We have long since stopped thinking about the artifice of tulips. Instead we imagine that real human influence on nature began a mere century ago, if not last month. In pursuit of a dynamic vision of nature and culture, however, the poet and critic Frederick Turner argues that we should rediscover Shakespeare's thoughts on the matter: that in 16th-century musings lie lost truths about the relation between the natural and the artificial and between the biological and economic worlds. "Shakespeare's core insight," Turner writes, "is that human-created value is not essentially different from natural value. The value that is added by manufacture, and the reflection of that value in profit, are but a continuation of nature's own process of growth and development."11 On transforming nature, Turner quotes the disguised king Polixenes' response to the shepherdess Perdita in The Winter's Tale. Like Marvell's mower, Perdita eschews engineered flowers that add art to "great creating Nature." Polixenes argues:
Yet Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but
The art itself is Nature.
The quest for improvement, and for novelty, does not overturn nature. It recreates it. By understanding how biological processes work, we turn them to human ends. We do not overthrow nature, but cooperate with it, using nature's own art to create new natural forms. Our artifice alters the path of nature, but it does not end it, for nature has no stopping point, no final shape. It is a process, not an end.
******
On the oldest part of the newest land in the United States, the ever-expanding Big Island of Hawaii, is a place that looks like Eden: the Waipi'o Valley. It nestles, flat and green, between a slate-gray beach and verdant cliffs up to 2,000 feet high. A stream winds through it, giving the valley its name, "curving water." The volcanic soil is rich, the rain ample, the temperature warm. For nine centuries, Waipi'o was Hawaii's breadbasket, its irrigated paddies supplying taro, whose starchy roots are mashed into poi. Fruit trees grow wild here—guava, mango, Java plum, banana—along with ginger, berries, medicinal plants, and edible ferns. The kukui, or candlenut tree, yields nuts that can be eaten or strung together and burned for hours of light. Wild horses and pigs roam the valley, and its water is full of prawn, fish, and escargot-like snails. Waterfalls dangle from the valley's back wall. Viewed from the plateau above, Waipi'o is a miniature world, small enough to cup in your hands. Except for the mosquitoes and a bit too much humidity, it does seem like paradise.
Yet there are few people here. And the stories Kelly Loo tells are full of hunger: How, as children in the valley, he and his friends used to swipe the food offerings their Chinese neighbors left for ancestral spirits. How he used to find eggs and hide them in the outhouse, hoarding them for himself. "What did I know?" he says. "I was a hungry kid."
Retired from a job with the water company, Loo now lives in a suburban-style home on the outlook above the valley, where amenities such as electricity and paved roads are available. He takes tourists down to the valley floor in his four-wheel-drive van, telling stories as he negotiates the 45-degree semi-paved one-lane road. He also grows taro, and has the calloused hands and herbicide-loving attitudes of a farmer.
Loo is thoroughly at home among the valley's plants and animals, happy with a garden to work and keep, full of Hawaiian natural lore. But he does not wax romantic about how "stability" distinguishes "flourishing ecosystems." It is not human nature to prefer poverty and hunger to the comforts of cold beer and four-wheel drive.
Besides, Loo knows that nature is not stable.
On April 1, 1946, a 50-foot-high wall of water slammed into this tranquil valley, flattening everything before it. The same tsunami killed 96 people in the city of Hilo, 50 miles to the south. The several hundred residents of Waipi'o escaped unharmed, but their homes and other buildings were destroyed. Today's valley has no sign of the houses, stores, or churches of Loo's boyhood. He points to a wild and vacant meadow where his hometown once stood.
The Waipi'o Valley's current "natural" state is the result of that cataclysm—and, just as surely, of the pull of economic opportunity elsewhere. In the valley, and in the rest of the world, nature is more complicated than romantic visions of stability suggest. Waipi'o did not arise spontaneously, created by autonomous nature seeking its proper form. Many of its varied flora and fauna are imports, brought by the Polynesians who first settled the island and the Europeans who followed centuries later. Palm trees, taro, and bananas are not native to bare volcanic rock.
Indeed, contrary to Gray's confident assertion about "the discipline of ecology in all of its varieties," ecologists no longer hold a static vision of nature. They no longer portray a balanced world that seeks equilibrium and is undisturbed in any major way by fire or flood, tidal waves or volcanos, drought or disease. The balance of nature "makes nice poetry, but it's not such great science," says the plant ecologist Steward T.A. Pickett. Instead, current ecological science emphasizes turmoil and disruption: Constant changes create conditions in which different species thrive. Some of those changes have nothing to do with people, but others are driven by human artifice. Deliberately set, human-controlled fires appear to have shaped the African savannas and American prairies, while the rainforests of Latin America, like the islands of Hawaii, contain many plants imported by pre-European settlers.
"There is almost no circumstance one can find where something isn't changing the system," says the paleoecologist George L. Jacobson Jr., who studies changes reflected in sediments and rocks. If nature does tend toward an equilibrium, he notes, "it's never allowed to get there, so we might as well not expect it to exist." Nature has no end, no goal, no one best state. Daniel Botkin, one of the leading scholars of the "new ecology," writes that:
nature, never having been constant, does not provide a simple answer as to what is right, proper, and best for our environment. There is no simple condition that is best for all of life. Some creatures are adapted to disturbed environments, like the Kirtland's warbler, an endangered bird that nests only in forests that have recently burned. The warbler became endangered because of the Smokey the Bear policy of our century to suppress all fires as unnatural and undesirable. Other species, like sugar maple, are adapted to relatively undisturbed conditions. An environment that is "best" has many different conditions at different locations at the same time. The nature that is best is not a single, idyllic scene from a Hudson River School of painting, but a moving picture show, mosaics on a video screen, many different conditions distributed in complex patterns across the landscape.
From a scientific point of view, stasis is neither natural nor desirable. Interpreting the Endangered Species Act to enforce a hands-off policy has endangered numerous species, from butterflies and songbirds to grizzly bears, that depend on habitat not found in "climax" forests. Different living things require different conditions; the diversity of life is encouraged by the dynamism of nature.
And assuming that nature will remain constant tends to backfire. Botkin began his career as the caretaker of Hutcheson Memorial Forest, an uncut stand of oak and hickory bought in the 1950s by Rutgers University. The forest's protectors assumed that leaving the woods alone was the best way to save it for posterity. The Hutcheson Forest was, said a 1954 article, "a cross-section of nature in equilibrium." Without human interference, the forest was expected to stay pretty much the same forever, each generation of trees providing for the next: "The present oaks and other hardwood trees have succeeded other types of trees that went before them. Now these trees, after reaching old age, die and return their substance to the soil and help their replacements to sturdy growth and ripe old age in turn." In this patch of New Jersey, the experts believed, nature had found its balance.
But the oaks did not reproduce; maples began to take over. By examining fire scars in the stumps of dead trees, Rutgers researchers discovered the artifice behind their cherished nature: Before Europeans arrived in New Jersey, Indians had burned the underbrush about every decade or so, presumably either to drive game or make travel easier. "These frequent fires cleared the understory, favored oaks over maples, and created the open forest of tall trees believed by naturalists in the early sixties to be original, constant, and unaffected by human influence," writes Botkin. The Indians weren't trying to produce a beautiful forest of hickory and oak; that particular mix of trees was a ripple effect, nature created as a consequence of art. Contrary to static assumptions about how ecologies work, Botkin warns, a place that is truly protected from human interference "may become a 'nature' nobody has ever seen before and perhaps nobody really wants." By contrast, the "environment that we like, and that we think of as 'natural'" is often the creation of earlier human action.
For ecologists like Botkin, a turbulent sense of nature in no way means that whatever humans do is good. It simply demands far more clarity about what human beings want from the environment and more research into how particular natural systems work. In some places, we may want to recreate the experience of nature as European explorers discovered it on the American continent 300 years ago, a nature shaped by Indians' artifice. In others, we may want to preserve a particular species or maintain fishing grounds. Or we may have more global purposes, planting trees not for their own sakes but to soak up carbon dioxide, for instance. Achieving any of these goals—all of which are "artificial"—requires careful data collection, sophisticated and subtle models, and significant local knowledge: When Botkin's research team sought to understand the fluctuations in Washington state salmon populations, they got the most useful information not from the traditional theory of "maximum sustainable yield" but from an old-time fisherman, who knew that future supplies of salmon could be predicted by the water levels in the stream when they hatched.
Far from trying to plough up biological systems, Botkin and his fellow ecologists are eager to preserve and extend them—to create the varieties of nature that environmentalists value. Botkin is suspicious of civil engineering to tame rivers and mourns the passing of the prairie; he thrills to the songs of sparrows and the howling of wolves, a symphony in the forest night. But he does not claim that "nature knows best." Rather, Botkin argues frankly for the human value of saving what he loves, for prairies as a connection to history and species preservation to serve our "aesthetic and moral sense." He does not disdain as artificial the restoration ecology that applies the mind of a gardener to the recreation of lost natural systems such as midwestern prairies. He believes human desires will and, by implication, should affect the evolution of nature. That belief puts Botkin at odds with green reactionaries, who despise human influence. He bluntly acknowledges, "Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable."
Botkin is a scientist, and he dodges the contentious political issues of whose definition of "desirable or undesirable" will get applied in what situation. In most of the examples he cites, where he himself has done applied research, the affected parties agree on the desirable outcome: The Hutcheson Forest was privately purchased in 1954; its owners want a forest of hickory and oak—the forest the first European settlers would have discovered. Similarly, most people want to protect Northwest salmon, if only to preserve the fishing stocks, and African elephants; the main issue is how to do so most effectively, with the least disruption of other human goals. (In many such cases, political economists using equally dynamic analysis have been independently working to square public goods with private incentives.) At least at their current stage of development, these questions are matters more of knowledge and technology than of power and coercion.
To reactionaries, however, Botkin's problem-solving approach is deeply political—and deeply offensive. In addressing such problems, Botkin relishes technology and believes it can help us understand and protect nature: "Having altered nature with our technology, we must depend on technology to see us through to solutions." He sees nature not as something pristine, to be protected from human interference, but as something valuable, to be preserved through human action.
Reactionaries, by contrast, need nature as a moral absolute, exemplified by its perfect balance. "The ecological perspective begins with a view of the whole, an understanding of how the various parts of nature interact in patterns that tend toward balance and persist over time," writes Al Gore in his best-selling book called, not coincidentally, Earth in the Balance. Botkin's research topples this entire world view. His work declares that nature has no single goal—that there is no static standard for "the natural." If nature doesn't define its own purposes, and if even "natural" states may incorporate human artifice, then nature is no guide even to its own proper destiny, much less to human life.
This idea is deeply troubling to reactionary greens. "On the first Earth Day, it seemed that the great coming struggle would be between what was left of pristine nature, delicately balanced in [climax-ecology pioneer] Eugene Odum's beautifully rational ecosystems, and a human race bent on mindless, greedy destruction," the environmental historian Donald Worster writes nostalgically. "Two decades later, however, ecology had lost any clear notion of what pristine meant."
Worster is a pioneer in his academic specialty and holds an endowed chair at the University of Kansas; his history of ecological ideas is a standard text. He cannot simply ignore the change that has swept through the science without sacrificing his own scholarly credibility. But Worster clearly prefers the era in which "nature" appeared to back his own social vision. So he treats the new ecologists' meticulous work as mere invention, backed by a "hidden agenda" of supporting modern life. Real ecology, good ecology, he implies, would come to different conclusions. Dynamic portrayals of nature, he charges, "constitute what I would call a new permissiveness in ecology....This new ecology makes human wants and desires the primary test of what should be done with the earth. It denies that there is to be found in nature, past or present, any standard for, or even much of a limitation on, those desires."
On this point, Worster is more or less correct. Botkin and his new ecologist colleagues do say that nature will be what we make it, that it has no "true" state. Humans do indeed have to choose and, in that choice, human wants and desires will be what matters. That is the way the world is. Of course, those wants and desires include the pleasures of beautiful places and "unspoiled" nature, however defined. But if people like Worster, or Botkin himself, want to preserve "wild" areas, they will have to convince others to share their desire. And to get the nature they want, they will have to do much more than simply keep out humans. They will have to exercise artifice—to set fires, to favor some species over others, to act as active gardeners, not passive guardians.
Nature does, of course, impose some constraints on human actions: We cannot, as far as we know, go faster than the speed of light or be in two places at the same time. Chemicals bond in some ways and not in others. Certain plants require bright sunlight, others shade. Salmon will only spawn under certain, quite complicated, conditions. Any gardener knows, with Sir Francis Bacon, that to be commanded, nature must be obeyed. Nature tells us that if we want X, we must do Y and cannot do Z. It does not tell us whether to want, or not to want, X. It does not dictate that wilderness areas must remain "untrammeled by man," that logging, automobiles, wheat fields, and Disneyland are inherently evil, or that every species of beetle should be preserved. Turbulent nature does not decree the one best state for each part of the globe. It cannot tell us what to want.
Worster emphatically knows what he himself wants, and he surely knows that his vision of the good life is unpopular—as a poverty-stricken reality, if not as a romantic fantasy. He recites the litany of peasant virtues, familiar from the writings of other green reactionaries, with its limits on risk-taking, innovation, and imagination: "A stable, enduring rural society in equilibrium with the processes of nature cannot allow much freedom or self-assertiveness to the individual....A farmer acts within a severely constraining network of duties and obligations that allow little personal initiative. That is the best way, people all over the world have understood, to avoid too much risk and preserve the rural community in harmony with the soil." Worster wants human beings to sacrifice their tool-making instincts, their inquisitiveness, their desire for comfort, and their freedom. If he can convince us that nature is static, then he can claim a moral, natural imperative to maintain static human societies.
But nature does not provide the moral imperatives Worster and other reactionaries would like, the arguments that would silence the claims of freedom, exploration, and material progress. About the proper way for humans to live, nature is silent. Nature is too diverse and too dynamic to offer absolutes.
******
Sam, tow-headed and full of energy, zips across the lawn with the back-and-forth gait that gives toddlers that name. He is a year and a half old and joyfully exploring new territory. Tired, he sacks out on the grass, shaded by his mother and by my husband, conversing at a college reunion. The biggest threat to this good-natured little boy appears to be that I will inadvertently step on him. (I miss, barely.)
But the wristband on Sam's arm, a name tag from the reunion's kids' program, contains a warning: As healthy as he looks, Sam has cystic fibrosis. Only three months earlier, he spent nine days in the hospital with pneumonia. A steady stream of antibiotics accounts for his apparent health, and twice a day his parents must pop their cupped hands against his chest in "percussive therapy" to loosen the mucus that would otherwise clog his lungs.
About 30,000 Americans have CF, which until a few decades ago killed its victims by the time they reached their teens. Better drugs and other therapies have extended life spans and freed people with the disease from frequent hospitalization: When Suzanne Thomlinson was diagnosed in 1964, her parents were told she might not live long enough to attend kindergarten. She is now a law school graduate who works as a bioethics counselor for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, supporting the research to which she feels she owes her life. Sam's mother tells me about a 60-year-old man active in Internet CF groups, a role model and inspiration. Still, cystic fibrosis remains a painful and ultimately deadly disease, killing most of its victims by their 30s.
Sam, however, has better chances. Time is on his side. Scientists are pushing hard to find a way to deliver corrective genes to respiratory system cells: The idea is to reprogram enough of those cells that the body will stop overproducing mucus. The research has gone more slowly than people hoped when the CF gene was isolated in 1989, but it is progressing steadily, spurred by biotech's usual combination of idealism, ambition, curiosity, and greed. Eventually, researchers hope to do more than fix individual cells, which die and are replaced by other cells that also need reprogramming. They envision gene therapy that will correct the problem at its source, making cells reproduce and grow without the defect. "This is an art," as Shakespeare said, "which does mend Nature, change it rather."
The very idea makes Bill McKibben sick. If the greenhouse effect doesn't end nature, he suggests, then genetic engineering will—and, worse yet, it will do so on purpose. Even if biotechnology works as well as advertised, which McKibben concedes "seems probable," it will make the world thoroughly phony, "a shopping mall, where every feature is designed for our delectation." That prospect is intolerable. "The end of nature sours all my material pleasures," he writes. "The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me."
Rearranging genes—treating them as components that can be recombined to meet human wants—is hardly our first venture in defying our given bodily natures. But genetic engineering extends artifice to a more fundamental level than did circumcision or Caesarean sections, hair coloring or artificial hips, contact lenses or heart transplants. It fiddles with the generic As and Bs that control (in extremely complicated ways) how we turn out. To alter Sam's genes so that he did not have cystic fibrosis would be to make every cell in his body artificial, directed to conscious human purposes. This art would not eliminate natural processes, but it would dramatically recreate them, as Renaissance gardeners changed the nature of tulips.
And it would open up a new infinite series. We imagine not a single standard of biological perfection, but many different desirable possibilities, depending on our tastes and goals. (Given the complex ways that genes appear to interact, it's unlikely that we can make combinations without tradeoffs.) And we aren't likely to ever be fully satisfied. Each improvement generates ideas for others.
Stasist critics warn that rather than face this weird-sounding biological future, we should just say no to all genetic engineering. Jeremy Rifkin, whose books on the subject McKibben praises, cautions against using gene therapy even to cure children like Sam. "Once we decide to begin the process of human genetic engineering," he writes in Algeny, "there is really no logical place to stop. If diabetes, sickle cell anemia, and cancer are to be cured by altering the genetic makeup of an individual, why not proceed to other 'disorders': myopia, color blindness, left-handedness? Indeed, what is to preclude a society from deciding that a certain skin color is a disorder?" People see health as a continuum with no obvious stopping point; once a condition they dislike is medically correctable, they want to do something about it. To avoid this infinite series, therefore, Rifkin demands a bright line: no genetic engineering of any kind.
Other biotech critics take a seemingly more moderate approach. The influential conservative bioethicist Leon Kass tries to draw the line at curing diseases, citing a "natural norm" of health. But this idea, like the notion of a single "natural" ecological state, falls apart on examination. Human beings in different times, places, and circumstances suggest different definitions of health; many of our biological characteristics evolved in environments in which we no longer live; and what's good for the species may not be good for a particular person.
The sickle-cell trait offers protection against malaria, a benefit to the species and in that sense a norm, but at the cost of giving lethal sickle cell anemia to people who inherit traits from both parents. A marathon runner and a boxer may be in peak condition, but what is healthy for each will be different. Barring technologies such as vitamin D supplements or sunscreen, the wrong skin color may indeed be a "disorder" in certain latitudes: Dark-skinned people face vitamin deficiencies in Scandinavia, while the pale risk serious sun damage in the tropics. Because of her low body fat, a top female marathon runner probably will not menstruate, a serious deviation from the natural standard of health; yet she may be, by other standards and her own goals, among the healthiest women on the planet. And fertility, which surely must be the "norm" for pre-menopausal adult females, is something many women seek medical intervention to avoid. So, for that matter, are the normal symptoms of menopause.
Contrary to Kass's notion of a "natural norm," health is not a static standard but a condition defined by the lives people want to lead. Some things are clearly unhealthy—heart attacks, for instance—but that is because they interfere with just about any imaginable human goal. Aside from such extreme cases, different goals will produce different choices about tradeoffs and standards. There is no reason to think that biotechnology, however powerful, will make it possible for someone with a sumo wrestler's physique to also run the marathon efficiently. What makes a condition "unhealthy" is not that it is "unnatural" but that it interferes with human purposes.
Kass's "natural norm," however, deems only a very narrow range of biological limitations are worthy of medical intervention. He accepts infertility, treats the extension of life expectancy by even 20 years as perverse, and condemns the "desire to prolong youthfulness." He issues a blanket condemnation of "our dissection of cadavers, organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization, surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery, 'wanted' children, 'rights over our bodies,' sexual liberation, and other practices and beliefs that insist on our independence and autonomy." Kass's "natural norm" of health accepts a lot of conditions that many, many people would like to avoid.
In this sense, Rifkin's assessment is basically correct. On a theoretical basis anyway, "there really is no logical place to stop" genetic interventions. At least some individuals will always be able to imagine a body better suited to their purposes. And even Kass admits that the general public does not honor his notion of health as a static, natural standard. "One feels that people are finding the natural boundaries of life unacceptable," he told The New York Times when a sixty-three-year-old woman had a baby with the help of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer, adding that "once you go that route, there's absolutely no limit." His comment was less about the specific case at hand than about the general, open-ended drive to let individuals shape their biological destinies.
If health is not a static norm, then Rifkin is right about the line between nature and artifice: The only way to protect "natural" genetics is to prohibit all interference with human genes, even if that means letting children suffer genetic diseases. We can't pick and choose our purposes, calling some "natural" and some "artificial." Whether we like it or not, genetic engineering is unnatural. It turns our basic genetic components into human artifice.
While ecology raises questions about what nature is really like, undercutting the idea of a single natural standard, biotechnology thus forces us to confront a more basic question: Suppose that we do have a standard of the natural. Does that make what's natural right and what's unnatural wrong? Does nature draw lines we are morally bound to respect? Is "the natural" an ethical trump?
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Much of the stasist opposition to biotechnology stems from the idea that such interventions in human biology are unnatural and hence immoral. As Kass told the Times: "Nobody wants to stand around and point a finger at this woman and say, 'You're immoral.' But generalize the practice and ask yourself, What does it really mean that we don't accept the life cycle or the life course? That's one of the big problems of the contemporary scene. You've got all kinds of people who make a living and support themselves but who psychologically are not grown up. We have a culture of functional immaturity." Defying nature, in this assessment, is both immoral and immature. Virtue and wisdom lie in accepting what nature gives us—a life course of three score years and ten, a life pattern determined by evolution and luck, not by human action.
Kass's reaction is what pediatrician and bioethicist Norman Fost has called the "I was like—whoa" argument, after an expression his teenage daughter frequently used to describe her shock and disgust with this or that friend's actions. Kass's disdain turns a subjective distaste for artifice into a philosophical principle, creating a high-brow version of McKibben's declaration that the prospect of genetic engineering "sickens" him. Indeed, Kass makes a positive virtue of interpreting aesthetic reaction as moral principle, writing elsewhere that "in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity."
The real problem for Kass's "natural science," it seems, may be the unrevolutionary nature of biotechnology—our ability to integrate once-inconceivable new technologies into the mundane conventions of bourgeois existence. We don't grab onto high-tech medicine because it's new and different but because it offers to solve practical problems. As a result, we draw even the most extraordinary technologies into a broader cultural context that is far more resilient than reactionary wise men like to think. In a world where it's no big deal to take hormone therapy or Prozac, have a face lift, or know a child's sex before birth, a world in which even such radical interventions as sex-change operations and heart transplants have failed to turn society upside-down, it is extremely difficult to argue that medical innovations are dangerous simply because they fool Mother Nature. It's also hard to maintain the "like—whoa" attitude for very long.
Kass's repugnance argument also begs the question of what is central to our humanity: Why is it defined by a biological form or reproductive process, rather than the quest to learn and improve our condition? Many dynamist thinkers argue that, paradoxically, change and self-transformation are among the truest expressions of our enduring human nature.
"If human nature, on whatever basis, is seen as encompassing at least some forms of self-creation or self-transformation, then change is an aspect of a continuing (and unchanging?) capacity or predisposition for change," writes Michael H. Shapiro, a legal scholar concerned with the philosophical implications of "performance enhancement" technologies. "Changing in some ways is thus remaining the same in another way: we continue the process of realizing one's potential-and perhaps even raising it." If, as Kass suggests, our wills are not autonomous of our bodies—as indeed they are not—the answer is not to subordinate the will to the body, the romantic choice. The answer is to allow mind and body to work together so that individuals can better accomplish their purposes
There may, of course, be specific moral arguments against particular biotech interventions, especially genetic changes to shape the not-yet-born, because those actions could cause suffering to the people they affect. But such arguments would be based on our moral sympathy and respect for individual lives and on particular knowledge of the specific application, not on a general reverence for natural forms. By contrast, revering nature means sacrificing the purposes of individuals to preserve the world as given: It requires that we force people to live with biological conditions that trouble them, whether diseases such cystic fibrosis or schizophrenia, disabilities such as myopia or crooked teeth, or simply less beauty, intelligence, happiness, or grace than could be achieved through artifice.
Turning nature into the source of morality has always been philosophically problematic. At its best, ethical naturalism provides useful heuristics based on highly stylized ideas of nature: By imagining individuals as possessing natural rights, for example, we curb the destructive impulse to intrude on their personal autonomy. Using a different model of nature, however, we could just as easily justify a contrary idea—the organic holism of the ethnic group or the dominance of the strong. Nature itself remains amoral and out of control, giving us only if-then statements, not telling us what to want or do. We cannot fob off our moral choices on nature. It offers not norms but only the "permissiveness" that Donald Worster scorns in the new ecology. And in our "biological century," nature has become a dangerous place to look for moral standards.
We live, after all, in an era in which evolutionary psychology explains that sexual promiscuity and often-violent sexual jealousy are only natural for human males, an outcome of reproductive imperatives. Psychopharmacology demonstrates that changing brain chemistry can change personality. Traits ranging from happiness to violent tendencies to sexual orientation appear to be at least partially "hardwired," the product of our natural physical makeup. These ideas have zoomed out of the labs, academic conferences, and psychiatrists' offices to permeate popular culture. They are the stuff of best-selling books, newsweekly cover stories, and talk show discussions. They are inescapable.
There are several possible reactions to these biological insights into the physical origins of the self. One, suggested by the writer Tom Wolfe, is that
the notion of a self—a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior—a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds—this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away....The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cypher into a giant among men...is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882.
The result, Wolfe fears, will be a "lurid carnival that...may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame." If we see ourselves as biological beings, whose nature arises from the interplay of purely physical forces, he predicts, all hell will break loose.
Clinging to ethical naturalism makes Wolfe's scenario all the more likely. Having established amoral nature as a moral exemplar, it leaves us with no way, short of divine revelation, to judge actions that have identifiable natural causes. Rather than teach us to live well in the world as it is, ethical naturalism can only imagine a different world and then tell us that this imagined nature dictates good behavior. That "noble lie" will not hold up for long, especially in a culture where every half-baked implication of every scientific discovery is instantly the subject of media chatter. No wonder Wolfe is scared.
Wolfe's is a plausible scenario, but not a necessary one. Equally plausible is Shapiro's suggestion that a greater understanding of our biological nature will simply give us more tools with which to shape our selves—more ways to "become more intelligent and lift [ourselves] to the very peaks of life," more ways to transform ourselves from helpless cyphers into giants. Those techniques won't necessarily make us more diligent, but they will certainly make us responsible for our fates.
If we understand biological nature as morally neutral, rather than a source of standards and justifications, there is no reason not to evaluate actions by their consequences rather than their causes. That a serial killer acted out of genetic and biochemical influences does not make his murders less terrible. That biology encourages a mother to protect her children does not make her nurturing less admirable. That the will summoned through some neurons can endure the pain or resist the anger signaled by others does not mean self-control is meaningless. David Hume was right: Reason has always been the slave of the passions. That makes the cultivation of life-enhancing moral sentiments, like the cultivation of better crops, both an exercise of artifice and an essential goal of civilization.
We have learned through sometimes bitter trial-and-error history that some behavior is compatible with human life, with peace and prosperity, and with increasing happiness and knowledge, and some is not. The source is less important than the result. We are well served to tolerate diverse personal goals, to respect the limits of centralized knowledge, to avoid hurting people who hurt no one themselves, and to respect the bonds of life not because natural forms tell us to do so but because we have learned through long and difficult cultural evolution that these rules will, more often than not, improve the human condition. The rules that permit dynamism and learning—that curb our instincts to distrust strangers, cling to the familiar, and impose our will on others—are among our most valuable of artifacts and, at the same time, the creators of new, evolving natural systems.
That our minds, our personalities, our selves are not separate from our bodies, that they are also natural systems, emerging from the complex interactions of their component physical parts, does not make them less precious or less important. It makes them all the more amazing. Nor does grounding our selves in physical substance make those selves less real—to the contrary. That understanding gives us greater opportunity to cultivate the selves we will become. To the traditional and enduring arts of "study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up," we add the tools of genetics and biochemistry.
The only question, then, is whether we will make those tools the province of individual self-fashioning or technocratic tyranny. When stasists invoke Brave New World to assail biotechnology, they forget that its world, too, is a static model: a technocratic nightmare controlled by a central authority, a completely artificial world molded to a single vision. It is the central control, not the technology, that makes that world artificial.
Aldous Huxley's imagined society in fact follows Pat Buchanan's maxim, offered as an attack on cloning, that "mankind's got to control science, not the other way around." It has taken up Rifkin's challenge to conduct a "rich and robust conversation over the kind of future we'd like for ourselves" and then imposed that single future vision.
Huxley's dystopia has heeded the advice of our technocratic bioethicists and editorialists—of all the people who solemnly intone that "society" must adopt an official, uniform attitude toward each new biological technique, rather than allow decentralized, trial-and-error choice. These technocrats argue, as one columnist puts it, that "[b]ecause of the emotional investment of family members, society's dispassionate heads must set policy." Following that pat prescription is the only way to get Brave New World. The novel's horror comes less from the mere presence of exotic technologies than from the uniformity and complacency of life in its world. It is a technocratic dystopia that has banished dynamism and cancelled the infinite series.
Contrary to Buchanan's personification of them, neither "mankind" nor "science" is a unitary actor. Both are complex, natural systems, composed of diverse individual human beings. Neither is under central control. The same is true of the "society" that Rifkin warns might "decid[e] that a certain skin color is a disorder." In a dynamist society, there can be no such decision, because there is no single authority to make it.
Yet time and again, stasists warn against biological dynamism for the very reason that they assume someone will be in charge, enforcing a homogenous model of humanity. Kass attacks in vitro fertilization and cloning on the grounds that "[t]o lay one's hands on human generation is to take a major step toward making man himself simply another one of the man-made things....Thus, human nature becomes simply the last part of nature that is to succumb to the modern technological project, a project that has already turned all the rest of nature into raw material at human disposal, to be homogenized by our rationalized technique according to the artistic conventions of the day." Kass's fear of "rationalized" homogenization assumes a technocratic world.
How, Rifkin muses, "is it possible for people to be leery of trusting anyone with authority over genetic technology and at the same time be in favor of the development of the technology itself?" The answer is simple. People want genetic technology to develop because they expect to use it for themselves, to help themselves and their children, to work and to keep their own humanity. They see the new biological arts, like the rest of medical science, from the point of view of customers, not the perspective of rulers. In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own. The stasists who frighten us with visions of bioengineered conformity forget that art is a way not just of controlling nature but of expressing and recreating the self. Only rarely will that self-expression lead to dull uniformity.
Our very selves, then, are part of the garden, simultaneously artificial and natural, within our control and beyond it. We need choose neither destruction nor quarantine: Nature and artifice are not antitheses but complements. "The wilderness is not just something you look at; it's something you are part of. You live inside a body made of wilderness material. I think that the intimacy of this arrangement is the origin of beauty. The wilderness is beautiful because you are part of it," writes architect Paul Shepheard. "Cultivation—the work of humans—has a different sort of beauty. There is nothing else under the sun than what there has always been. Cultivation is the human reordering of the material of the wilderness. If it is successful, the beauty of it lies in the warmth of your empathy for another human's effort."
To reorder the material of the wilderness is the work of humans. But it is also our play, an activity pursued for its own sake. Through it, we not only create and explore nature but enjoy it. The sources of dynamism—of creativity and cultivation—lie not just in discipline but in delight.
Copyright 1998. All rights reserved.
