Techno-Utopia or Peaceable Kingdom:
Where Are We Going?
by Dr. Michael W. Fox
In America, I have seen the bioconcentration camps of the industrial holocaust of the animals – the factory farms, the puppy mills, and the biomedical animal research facilities. I have also seen the biological deserts of agribusiness’ monocrops that blight the land and impoverish the soil and rural communities from coast to coast. What I saw, I suffered. What I suffered was as much for the animals, for Nature, and for indigenous peoples as for the evident loss of humanity – the spiritual disease of my own species.
The inhumanity of wholesale animal and environmental exploitation with its core of rationalism, fatalistic acceptance (in the name of progress), desensitization and denial, and its veneers of efficiency, necessity, productivity and proficiency, fill me with outrage as a veterinarian, and shame as a human being. The animal welfare and environmental regulations and reforms that the life science industry has adopted have more to do with public image than with real concern for animals, rural communities, and Nature’s beauty and biodiversity.
The plight of animals in less developed countries, like the sacred and suffering cows and elephants of India, and especially the poor donkeys, buffaloes and dogs, is not a consequence of poverty or culture. I have found a similar core of rationalization, desensitization, denial, and fatalistic acceptance (in the name of karma), as in the West.
Many people who claim to care for animals only do so more out of concern for their own spiritual purity or public image.
It is all simply a matter of choice: To be humane or inhumane; to care or not to care. That is the question for every culture and community, industry and institution, East and West. This choice, I believe, is our final choice.
Theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw it as “the final choice between suicide and adoration.” That is why I link animal liberation with human liberation as others have linked liberation theology with human rights and egalitarianism. I equate the survival of our humanity with the survival of the natural world; and the recovery of humanity with the recovery of organic, sustainable and socially just agriculture and agriforestry.
Between the antipodes of hope and despair is our faith that is based upon different beliefs, values, and traditions. My faith in and passion for animal liberation, and more broadly for the liberation of all life from human ignorance, arrogance, and greed, are put to test everyday. I do not hope or despair because I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a realist, and what is real is what we feel and how we respond to the reality of the suffering of others and to the holocaust of the animals and the natural world. My faith and passion guide, sustain, and inspire me. But without the renewal and affirmation of hands-on animal healing and wildlife habitat conservation work, coupled with the support of kindred spirits, I would question the purpose of my existence. I see that faith without service, compassionate action, and honest confrontation with the evils of inhumanity, amounts to nothing more than feel-good denial: And silence is complicity.
I do not put my hope in the “future.” There is only the eternal now and the everlasting presence in which we are transient, mortal participants and witnesses, with the power and freedom to choose between good or evil, humanity or inhumanity, service or stewardship and compassionate action, or denial and indifference. These are not choices for the future for us to make, initiate, or legislate tomorrow, next week or next year. They are choices to be made right now and every waking moment of mindfulness. This does not mean that we should not consider the future consequences of our actions.
Without the ethics of consequentialism and the global bioethics that I discuss in my book Bringing Life to Ethics, science is as dangerous as religion is blind without science, to paraphrase Albert Einstein. But when we are fully engaged in the eternal now, guided by humility, reason and compassion, and inspired by loving concern and reverence for all life, we are free to do as we will. We gain this freedom when our will is in harmony with the will-to-be of the rest of the life community that was here on Earth long before us and which, in myriad ways, contributes to our health and well-being. This is the way of human liberation and to a better world, a way very different from the better world to come that science and technology have promised us from one generation to the next.
Absence of the Sacred
I am aghast at the absence of the sacred in the hearts and minds of so many people today. The state of mind – the rationalist instrumentalism of Techno-Utopians – is part of the dominant culture, like the bioengineers of cloned, genetically engineered, and patented animals, including insects and fish that even contain human genes, and of transgenic crops for us all to eat that contain and produce their own pesticides and contain alien DNA of potentially harmful viral, bacterial and other self-replicating molecular configurations. This dominant monopolistic culture of materialism and consumerism sees life not as sacred but as a commodity and as capital. In so demeaning life, we demean ourselves in participating in a value system that sees Earth’s (or God’s) Creation as a resource, and sentient life forms as a means to human ends rather than as ends in themselves, possessing intrinsic value and extrinsic (ecological) purpose.
Perhaps the mind behind the virtual reality of a utopia through techno-eugenics, where endangered species are “saved” by cloning and even improved through genetic engineering, has an abnormal conception of what it means to be human in the absence of the sacred. A public that condones without question such activities in the interests of conservation and endangered species preservation has been deluded by the enchantment of others involved in animal cloning and transgenics. The primary beneficiaries of this new biotechnology are its investors and corporate empires that increasingly control agriculture, medicine, world trade, and our universities, academia, and government. New discoveries and uses for the genes of endangered animal and plant species is a venture capitalist’s dream. So the last of the wild is being prospected and exploited and also the DNA of soon-to-be-gone indigenous peoples and their food and feed crops and medicinal herbs. Gene saving and gene-prospecting and piracy is the market-driven wave that is turning the natural world into a virtual reality, with cloned panda bears; organ and blood donor pigs, and eco-friendly pigs whose manure is less polluting; cows that produce human milk and valuable pharmaceuticals; pesticide-producing wondercorn and supersoy resistant to herbicides, and “improved” golden rice with more vitamin A to promote monoculture farming and public acceptance of genetically engineered crops and foods; even bio-ethnic bombs made of self-replicating constructs of recombinant DNA that are lethal to Arabs or Jews, or to rabbits, rodents, insects, and other pests of plague and pestilence, famine and war.
Consider the creation of transgenic seeds by some multinational life science corporations that only produce sterile seeds so that farmers can’t save seeds from the best plants. The pollen from these crops could genetically contaminate other crops and wild plants with the so-called terminator gene construct of self-replication DNA. Such genetic pollution has already occurred with other types of transgenic crops of corn, canola, and soybean, and could have devastating economic and ecological consequences. This is a technology nobody needs.
As Kahlil Gibrhan said, “Pity a country that has another make its own bread,” so I would say pity a species that exploits and harms more than it serves and heals. The biotechno-utopia of genetic engineering sustains and justifies itself because it profits from harm by promising techno-fixes for a multitude of harms like disease and malnutrition, and yet has no scientific or ethical basis to assure that it will not cause even more harm.
This is likely, because the advocates of biotechnology, like the predecessor advocates of agrichemicals and the “Green Revolution,” have ignored both the law of unforeseen consequences and the precautionary principle in their assertions that this new technology is safe and is the best, if not the only way to keep humankind adequately fed and healthy. People need new organs from transgenic pigs in part because of what they consume in a poisoned environment.
Agricultural biotechnology is evolving into a monopolistic monoculture of conspicuous consumption that is annihilating the natural world; the First Creation, soon to be supplanted by the virtual reality of the second, human creation of a bioindustrialized system that is turning the Earth into a wasteland. This is the terminal reality of an exterminator species that we are fast becoming as we misapply science and technology for pecuniary and desperate ends.
Rather than changing radically, and for many, painfully, the way we live, making our values and wants truly democratic, egalitarian and wholly ethical, we look to science and technology instead to make the world a better place. Wise animals seek to adapt themselves to the world. Foolish ones try to change the world for themselves. The natural world is no place for fools or foolishness, and the fools who fool around with Mother Nature, as history and environmental health science and medicine inform, will suffer the consequences: The law of karma indeed, as exemplified by the public health costs of pesticide-contaminated food and antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria from factory farmed animals.
Homo technos – the Parasite
Any anthropologist will attest to how adaptive cultures and communities accommodate to their environments in order to achieve sustainability. They can identify those that became extinct because they tried to force the environment to accommodate nonsustainable needs (wants and greed), which is a maladaptive, pathological, and pathogenic relationship. It is parasitic. Most parasitic creatures regress and degenerate physically and mentally, and many kill their hosts. Being in human form may not give any significant adaptive-survival advantage to a culturally mutated, parasitic way of life.
It could be a distinct disadvantage. Looking at the long-term success of lice and fleas, tapeworms and ringworms, I would say that being a parasite with the technological appendices and capacities of Homo technos (the mutated form of Homo sapiens) that today is becoming the one dominant culture of the entire biosphere, is a distinct disadvantage. It is poisoning and destroying the Earth and peddling science and technology to heal and make whole as the poisoning and destruction continues unabated. Too far regressed in spirit, body and mind, the parasite Homo technos will eventually become extinct.
Humanitarians – all who cherish the natural world and whom I call the “first people” -- today are moved to protect and heal all whom and what they can of the First Creation, so that there will be something left of the life and beauty of the Earth after this techno-parasite has had its last consumptive suck, and as Chief Seattle foresaw, suffocates in its own waste. The “end of living and the beginning of survival” is the recent history of his and other indigenous peoples. All who belong to the Earth and feel that deep connection in their souls and in their hearts of longing and ever deepening communion, must rise up and suffer the nemesis of Homo technos. This is the apotheosis of those who are twice-born and having died to the culture of industrialism and consumerism, seek to live simply so that others may simply live, and sow the seeds of humility, gentleness, and loving kindness toward all sentient beings. They have no time for rage or rhetoric, since they know that only with respect for each other, for Nature, plants and animals, can wisdom and love find expression and peace on Earth be restored. As the luminary Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “When one really loves Nature, one will find beauty everywhere.” But many now see beauty in a different light – in ordered monocultures of forests, orchard, and crops, and even in industrial factory “parks” that are sanitized versions of the “satanic mills” of the industrial revolution that revolted the sensibilities of another artist and seer, William Blake.
We would all be well advised to reflect on the wisdom of medicine man Black Elk, who observed, “It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.”
A Virtual World Devoid of Virtue
The use of cloning and other biotechnologies to propagate endangered species and to even resurrect extinct creatures, like the wooly mammoth, the marsupial wolf, or Tazmanian devil, puts us on the threshold of creating a virtual reality. A virtual reality that supplants the sacred reality and organic wholeness and integrity of the natural world may well become the norm for a virtual humanity in the near future; a future where virtue is supplanted by the instrumental and self-serving values of rationalism and materialism.
Technology will then be the dominant religion. Scientists and economists will be the priests and prophets of a market-driven global monoculture that treats life as an exploitable and patentable commodity, and Nature’s creative processes are perverted to become the means to satisfy purely human ends for an increasingly desperate and depraved existence. This future is not inevitable, provided we can conserve ethics, virtue and a sense of the sacred from the tyranny of rationalism and materialism and the narcissistic enchantment of technology, especially biotechnology.
Global Bioethics
Recent industrial, agricultural, medical and military advances and applications of science, especially in the realms of information technology, robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology have been proceeding in an ethical vacuum. While ethics without science is lame, science without ethics is blind. Biotechnology without bioethics is a danger to all. Hence, the urgent need at this time to challenge the scientific community worldwide to become ethical by making ethics an integral part of the scientific paradigm in order to properly address risks and benefits, and to be publicly accountable. A techno-dystopia, based upon industrial imperialism, narrow scientific determinism, and materialism, has been created that is now a threat to the integrity and future of both humankind and the entire earth community. The kind of ethics that needs to be adopted is in part science-based (with biological, behavioral and ecological perspectives) and was first called bioethics in 1976 by the late Prof. Van Rensselaer Potter. Because of the worldwide need to incorporate bioethics into science and all other fields of human activity – agriculture and all petrochemical/fossil fuel based industries, and world trade in particular -- I offer the following synopsis of global bioethics as potential guideline and antidote, from my book Bringing Life to Ethics: Global Bioethics for a Humane Society:
1. Global bioethics calls us to give equally fair consideration to three spheres of moral concern:
--Human well-being (rights and interests)
--Nonhuman well-being (rights and interests)
--Environmental well-being (biodiversity and ecosystemic integrity).
2. Global bioethics calls us to be accountable for our actions and appetites in relation to these three spheres; and to examine how well society, our politics, laws, economies (industry and commerce), religious, educational, and other traditions and institutions, as well as our own personal lives, are in accord with the bioethical principles that unify these three spheres in the light and language of compassion, humility, and reverence for the sanctity of life.
3. Global bioethics calls us to actualize our natural, innate empathic sensitivity, moral sensibility and powers of reason, reflection, and also self-control by embracing the precautionary principle.
4. Global bioethics calls us to consider the purpose and potentials of human existence, the significance of the virtues that make us humane beings, and our duties and responsibilities for the Earth Community, and for the integrity and future of Creation.
5. Global bioethics calls us to understand and respect the cultural ecology of moral pluralism, and from this diversity of human beliefs, opinions, and desires, create a common ground of equalitarianism and respect for all life.
6. Global bioethics calls us to develop a unity of spirit for more effective and immediate crisis management, conflict resolution, and humane intervention where the compass of compassion directs reason and action toward world peace, justice, environmental and animal protection, conservation and restoration of biological and cultural diversity, and security and fulfillment for all living beings.
7. Global bioethics promotes and unifies Earthcare, Peoplecare, Animalcare, and Healthcare for the good of all.
8. This unification is expressed as Human Wellbeing = Health care + Earth care + Animal care.