Response to ...Eugenics in the 21st Century

One part of the discussion that got my attention was the points made from the article by Dr. Zimmerman in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, regarding germ line therapy. He proposes that parents may be ethically responsible for the children they have not yet conceived. Even today, right now, in 2009, we (as a Western culture) don't hold parents responsible for the health of the children already born to them. Yes, parents ought to be held liable for birth defects due to inutero abuse of their children as in cocaine-addicted babies or fetal alcohol syndrome, but we do not prosecute these parents. We do not prosecute parents who smoke, or don't maintain an otherwise healthy lifestyle. We allow the religious beliefs of parents to influence medical care; we don't intervene or control people with hereditary diseases from conceiving children. Some day in the future, germ line therapy may cure the biological ills of our race, but I doubt that it can perfect our behavior towards eachother.

The Cult of the Amateur… I always have thought that Huxley’s theorem of the monkeys-typing-could-produce-Hamlet was a great insult to Shakespeare, not to mention the rest of us who produce journals, letters, blogs, emails and bad poetry. If Mr. Keen thinks the birth of cultural mediocrity only recently occurred with Web 2.0, then he hasn’t left his tower long enough to read, watch, or listen to the same books, newspapers, movies, TV shows or music that is widely consumed by the rest of us less discriminating beings. It has always been the onus of the consumer to judge the value of the goods available, and to differentiate material worth its price, be that a cost of time or money.

Each technological advance in our culture that facilitates communication seems to alarm those like Mr. Keen who feel there is a certain quality of life that will be destroyed by a loss of control over the editorializing and distribution of uncensored information. But what Web 2.0 has delivered is not a world of chaos, but a venue of creativity; literally at our fingertips. We can express ourselves with a spectrum of tools not even imaginable in the past. Our audience is the world. It seems reasonable to say that in the wide open cyberspace of the Web, there is enough room for the material of the educated and duly qualified experts, as well as the unrestrained entertainment of many proliferate amateurs.

One last thought. When I open my laptop and sign on, I don’t think of it as Pandora’s Box. It’s more like a box of magic tricks … and anything might happen.