>From The Spectator, a conservative periodical, opposing stem cell research.
This is the kulturkampf currently building up in Europe between rationalists
and naturalists (or should they be called more accurately, romantics.
Philip Chaston
Read on...
The sordid isolation of Britain
Throughout the world, Britain’s decision to legalise ‘therapeutic’ cloning
was seen as a giant leap towards the dehumanising of mankind. But, says
Daniel Johnson, Tony Blair was quite indifferent
George W. Bush’s visit to John Paul II this week was not a summit, but a
pilgrimage. Perhaps ‘Castelgandolfo’ will enter history, as ‘Canossa’ did a
thousand years ago. Just as the Emperor Henry IV submitted to Pope Gregory
VII, so the President deferred to the Pope, the temporal lord to the
spiritual. For half an hour, the most powerful person in the world looked
like the junior partner of the man he addressed, quite sincerely, as ‘Holy
Father’. Mr Bush recognised the fact that, though the Pope has no divisions,
the modern world is ruled not by armies but by words.
Did they talk about peace? Poverty? Pollution? No: the subject that weighed
most heavily on their consciences was stem cell research. President Bush is
agonising about whether to keep his campaign pledge to deny federal funds
for experiments which involve the creation, ‘harvesting’ and destruction of
embryos. Such research includes ‘therapeutic’ human cloning, from which
scientists promise to create human ‘spare parts’ and to cure degenerative
diseases, but which the Pope condemns as an ‘evil’ comparable to euthanasia
and infanticide. So sensitive is this issue in the United States that it
could set the tone for the entire Bush presidency. As I write, Congress
looks likely to pass a Bill to ban the creation of embryos by cloning. Mr
Bush is said to support the Bill.
In recent months, several distinguished American visitors have impressed me
with the emphasis they place upon bioethical issues. George Weigel, the
biographer of John Paul II, told me that the absurd faith vested in genetic
research is a phenomenon of secularised religion, with its promise of
‘miracle cures’, the deification of the scientist, and the indefinite
postponement of death. ‘This is the immortality project,’ he said. This
conviction is shared by American Jews as well as Catholics. Irving Kristol
and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the founders and leading voices of
neo-conservatism, told me that they see this field as ‘the politics of the
future’.
It is a measure of how seriously the President takes ‘the culture of life’
that he has even adopted the idiom of the Pope whose ‘profound’ views he
respects even when they disagree. Indeed, Mr Bush makes a point of visiting
Catholic prelates wherever he travels in the United States. Yet the
President, remember, is not a Catholic, but an evangelical Methodist.
Tony Blair, by contrast, is an Anglican, perhaps even — as his biographer
John Sopel suggests — a crypto-Catholic. Yet it is almost inconceivable that
the Prime Minister would have made such a pilgrimage to sit at the feet of
an octogenarian pope — especially one of John Paul II’s uncompromising
orthodoxy — to listen to his warnings against stem cell research. Mr Blair
is just not interested in anything that a supreme pontiff might have to say
about the mass destruction of human embryos. Mr Blair does not even realise
that he has just given the green light to the genetic modification of Homo
sapiens.
Britain is the first country in the world explicitly to legalise the
‘therapeutic’ cloning of human embryos, just as we were among the first to
legalise abortion. This momentous step was not even accorded the dignity of
an Act of Parliament, but was smuggled through as an amendment to a
statutory instrument, without proper debate. Having rammed it through the
Commons last December and the Lords in January, Mr Blair was quite
indifferent to the dismay it provoked throughout Europe and America. While
the British media took their cue from the government’s pretence that this
was a mere clarification of the law, the rest of the world rightly saw this
small step for genetics as a giant leap towards the dehumanising of mankind.
While most British newspapers relegated the story to the inside pages, it
dominated the front page of Germany’s heavyweight broadsheet, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Britain was widely accused of excluding
herself from European civilisation. Reaction in the United States was no
less vehement; and, in France, President Chirac immediately assured his
countrymen that France would not follow Britain’s lead and called for an
international ban on all human cloning; last month the French government
proposed a ban on human cloning ‘for research purposes’. Even the Dutch, who
have legalised euthanasia, have no plans to follow Britain’s example.
Of course, there were those who approved. Severino Antinori, the maverick
Italian professor who has promised to clone human babies for infertile
couples, was among those who praised to the skies ‘Tony Blair’s intelligent
decision’.
Those respectable scientists who have already cloned animals, and who know
the terrible abnormalities it is almost certain to engender in the few
cloned foetuses that do not spontaneously abort, agree with the leading
American expert Professor Rudolf Jaenisch in condemning human cloning as ‘an
outrageous criminal enterprise to even attempt’. The British Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority joined in the chorus, but Professor
Antinori is correct in supposing that the Prime Minister’s advocacy of
therapeutic cloning has helped to legitimise reproductive cloning.
Mr Blair, in short, is a bioethical Little Englander. He divorces his
Christian beliefs from his actions and subordinates moral imperatives to
political or economic ones. This is his most considered attempt to justify
therapeutic cloning, in a speech to the European Bioscience Conference last
November: ‘Our conviction about what is natural or right should not inhibit
the role of science in discovering the truth; rather it should inform our
judgment about the implications and consequences of the truth science
uncovers. We should also realise that there are areas where even in
exercising such judgment, there is more than one morally acceptable outcome.
’
What this appears to mean is that mora-lity must not be permitted to
‘inhibit’ research; that there are no moral absolutes; and that it is
acceptable to treat unborn life as a means to an end. For Mr Blair that end
is not primarily the ethical one of alleviating human suffering — though
even this could not justify the cannibalistic dismemberment of the unborn
for the sake of adults. It is the political and economic one of keeping
‘Britain at the forefront of world science’. The use of a racing metaphor to
justify a form of human sacrifice indicates moral idiocy. This is what the
Pope had in mind in his warning to President Bush: ‘Experience is already
showing how a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on
innocent human life in the womb.’
When Mr Blair was asked by Roger Highfield, the Daily Telegraph’s science
editor, whether the Blairs would be prepared to donate their own embryos for
stem cell research, he declined ‘to get into this very personal question’.
He was not, in other words, prepared to apply his policies to himself.
The British treat bioethics as a matter of taste. There is an unspoken
agreement among senior politicians in this country to exclude anything that
smacks of American pro-life versus pro-choice politics. Though it is among
the commonest operations performed by the NHS, abortion is never treated as
a normal political issue. If it were, the strong correlation between
abortion and breast cancer might have received a proper airing. The same
fastidiousness applies to abortifacient drugs, such as the ‘morning after’
pill, which the government has now made available to teenagers over the
counter without proper warnings about the health risks.
Likewise, the creation of hundreds of thousands of embryos purely for
experimentation since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 has
scarcely figured in public consciousness. There has been no cost-benefit
analysis of the scientific case that swayed the Warnock committee in favour
of permitting embryo research. Such an analysis would have revealed that
there have been few, if any, medical advances as a result of a decade of
such experiments, let alone practical benefits for patients. IVF, the one
(heavily qualified) success story, could have been permitted without giving
researchers carte blanche to treat embryos as a disposable means to a
dubious end. But the absence of public debate saved boffins and bigwigs from
the embarrassment of a proper audit.
And so, when the issues of embryonic stem cell research and cloning surfaced
in the late 1990s, most politicians again accepted uncritically the claims
made by scientists, many of them representing large commercial interests.
Cures were promised for everything from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s; the onus
was placed on those who opposed such research to justify ‘denying’ new
treatments to desperately ill patients.
The British, as usual, paid heed not to mad scientists but to bad
scientists. Never mind the fact that ‘spare body parts’ can be grown from
adult stem cells and that cells taken from the umbilical cord share many
embryonic features, or that stem cells are plentifully available from other
adult tissue including liposuctioned fat (what one US commentator drily
called ‘our nation’s most plentiful resource).
Never mind the fact that embryonic stem cells appear far less suitable for
the kind of purposes scientists are seeking, as they are notoriously
unstable — ‘hard to rein in’, as one American bioethicist puts it.
Never mind the fact that in America (unlike Britain) the scientific
consensus in favour of adult stem cell research and against unreliable
embryonic cell research is so clear that the former attracts ample private
investment, whereas embryo research is obliged to seek federal funds.
Never mind the fact that the inevitable consequence of legalising
‘therapeutic’ cloning was that some scientists would be emboldened to press
on with ‘reproductive’ cloning.
So the British political, medical and pharmaceutical establishments
presented a united front to the public. The only dissenting voice came from
the Churches and other faiths. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the
Cardinal Archbishops of Westminster and Glasgow, Evangelicals and Baptists,
Free Church and Greek Orthodox spokesmen, the Chief Rabbi, leaders of the
Muslims and Sikhs all requested a meeting with the Prime Minister. Any one
of these clerics would have been granted access to the Bush White House
without delay. But the united representatives of Britain’s multi-faith,
multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society were snubbed no fewer than four times
by Mr Blair. In the end, they addressed an open letter to the House of
Lords, pleading merely for time to reflect, only to be snubbed again, this
time by the government whips, who worked overtime to ensure that the
legislation should not be impeded by a mere ‘free vote’.
Meanwhile, in Germany, ‘intellectual civil war’ has raged for the past few
months. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has appointed a permanent commission of
experts to advise him on bioethical issues, and he seems to be impressed by
Mr Blair’s refusal to allow moral objections to ‘inhibit’ scientific
progress. But public opinion in Germany is still deeply suspicious of
anything that reminds them of a master race.
That, according to the Oxford philosopher Professor Sir Michael Dummett, is
one of the strongest objections to cloning: the creation of a Western elite,
genetically perfected, which could lord it over the rest of humanity.
Chancellor Schroeder’s guru, Juergen Habermas, has asked for scientists to
treat the embryo as if it were looking over one’s shoulder: could one
justify one’s research to the victim?
Most Germans understand that what was wrong with Nazi eugenics was not
simply its cruelty; it was treating the individual as a means to a
collective end. Americans, many of whom fled from the Nazis, grasp this too.
So do most Continental Europeans, whether Catholic or Protestant. Only in
Britain do politicians suppose that it is ‘utilitarian’ to sacrifice the
individual for some notional social end — though only the vulgarisers of
Bentham and Mill ever taught this. Any utilitarian calculus would reveal
that the risks of eugenics far outweigh the benefits. Can it be right that,
to satisfy the primaeval urge of a self-selected elite to see their genes
perpetuated, the entire natural order should be inverted?
And so the British — despite their instinctive revulsion for human cloning —
acquiesce in our sordid isolation. We are indeed leading the world; leading
it in an unheard-of abdication of responsibility, the hubris of inhumanity.
The nation of Burke has trampled underfoot the unwritten contract between
the living and the unborn. The present generation has no right to
instrumentalise the next, merely in order to prolong its own longevity. The
selfish gene has become a selfish genie, now too late to rebottle. Britain
is the laboratory in which posterity is sacrificed for the illusion of
immortality.
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