Austin Hall Library

Who Speaks for the Embryo?

Modern biotechnology (the application of the principles of engineering and technology to the life sciences), with its scientific tunnel vision and its concern for improving human health and increasing life spans, now appears to be at the mercy of the "technological imperative." The principle of the technological imperative means that because a particular technology allows us to do something (i.e., it is technically possible), then we ought, must, or inevitably will do it.

Thus, for the first time in the history of the world, modern biotechnology bereft of moral constraints has progressed from sex without babies to babies without sex, the destruction of human embryos to advance research, human cloning, fetal farming to obtain whole organs or other complex tissues, egg farming in young women for embryo cloning, and even the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos. Because it can be done, it is being done.

Even Nietzsche, in whom, Camus said, "nihilism became conscious for the first time," seemed to realize the effect in the modern mind when it became conscious of its abandonment of the moral, metaphysical world:

"What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

Heidegger was likely right when, at the end of his life, he declared, "only a god can save us."

But, fortunately for now, we still have clear-thinking men whom God can use to challenge the technological imperative and, particularly, to speak for the often forgotten embryo. Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen are two such men and their excellent new book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, makes a compelling scientific and philosophical case that every tiny embryo is an individual human being deserving of respect and protection at its earliest stage of development.

George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and Tollefsen, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, have produced an outstanding work that deserves careful attention from anyone serious about bioethics and concerned about science's capitulation to the technological imperative.

By the way, the photo in the upper right-hand corner of this post was published in Time magazine in 2007. The embryo is approximately one week old--about the same age as that of countless embryos from whom stem cells are intentionally harvested virtually every day, thus killing the tiny embryo.

The Forgotten Virtues of Community

Having traveled to downtown Chicago recently, I recall a reading recommendation of a friend mentioned some time back in a blog post comment. He recommended Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s.

I have the book and it is a provocative look at three Chicago neighborhoods at a time generally considered the "golden age of community": the 1950s. With keen analysis, Ehrenhalt reveals the glue that held each community together: the limitations of life and accepted authority figures. Beneath the author's analysis, it is not difficult to see that the breakdown of authority in society is a source of cultural decline, and even personal happiness.

This book does not romanticize or whitewash city life in the 1950s, but it does challenge some of the commonly held assumptions about the unmitigated value of progress. And it brings to light a theme increasingly suspected in society today: the rise of unlimited personal freedom and breathtaking cultural progress is not a friend of community.

Importance of the Right Mentors

“And so I came to Milan to Ambrose the bishop.” These are the poignant words of St. Augustine, simply recording in the late fourth century his arrival to study under the man who would become his mentor. Initially charmed by his rhetorical skills, Augustine eventually realized Ambrose’s preaching the “sound doctrine of salvation,” was “drawing him closer.” (CONFESSIONS, 5.13.23).  Simplicianus, a devout cleric, was Ambrose’s mentor, and his eventual successor in Milan.

In A.D. 397, Augustine wrote a very important watershed work entitled, TO SIMPLICIANUS: ON DIVERSE QUESTIONS, in which he completely upends much of his previous work on sin, free will, grace, and other critical issues. This work came as a result of the effect of St. Paul’s writings on Augustine and a serious and lengthy study on the fallenness of man. From A.D. 396 onward, St. Augustine’s doctrine of the fall of man is central and determinative of virtually everything he wrote. Whether he was right or wrong, failure to understand the development of Augustine’s thought, his mentors, and these watershed events is failure to understand Augustine.

How critical it is to have the right spiritual and intellectual mentors. For good or bad, our lives have a way of becoming intertwined with our mentors. We first choose them, and later they mold us—imperceptibly at first, but powerfully in the end.