Enough Already

A leading environmentalist makes a foolish case against technological innovation.

Ronald Bailey from the October 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

If the endless future turns out to be as horrible as McKibben imagines it to be, then people will undoubtedly choose to give up their empty, meaningless lives. On the other hand, if people opt to live yet longer, wouldn't that mean they had found sufficient pleasure, joy, love, and even meaning to keep them going? McKibben's right: We don't know what immortality would be like. But should that happy choice become available, we can still decide whether or not we want to enjoy it. Even if the ultimate goal of this technological quest is immortality, what will be immediately available is only longevity. The experience of longer lives will give humanity an opportunity to see how it works out. If immortality is a problem, it is a self-correcting problem. Death always remains an option.

Given all his worries, what does McKibben want us to do? He wants us to say "enough" along with him and reject the Promethean prospects before us. Humanity should decide collectively to limit its technological questing once and for all. This is not an impossible dream, he thinks, because some societies have, at times, chosen to relinquish some technologies. The examples he wants us to follow, however, involve a pair of backward autocracies -- 15th-century Ming China and 17th-century Tokugawa Japan -- and the contemporary Amish, an example that actually undermines his argument.

Here's McKibben's case for China. Between 1405 and 1430, the Chinese admiral Zheng He made at least seven major voyages with the largest fleet the world had ever seen. These "treasure fleets" consisted of 300 huge ships holding a troop of nearly 30,000 people. Zheng He's fleets visited Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Siam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Ceylon, Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Arabia, and Somalia. McKibben praises the Chinese emperors who chose to burn the great treasure fleet and destroy all records of the voyages. To prevent further adventuring, these emperors made it a capital offense to build a boat with more than two masts. Thus, declares an approving McKibben, "a great people turned its back on a promising technology." He adds, "The Chinese chose their definition of meaning -- progress within tradition -- over the pell-mell dynamism of the West."

But did a "great people" really choose to forego the blessings of technology and trade? Isn't a far more reasonable interpretation that the rulers of China, who wanted nothing to disrupt their iron hold over the lives of their subjects, made that decision, not Chinese "society"?

Next, McKibben describes Tokugawa Japan as "a highly advanced feudal society." He praises it for outlawing firearms for two centuries. Why? Because "the samurai simply felt that guns were crude, that any peasant could use one," explains McKibben. Which is precisely the point -- naturally the beneficiaries of a warrior feudal society would want to make sure that the "peasants" didn't get hold of such equalizers. The peasants didn't relinquish firearms; their masters did it for them. But who cares about the meanings of the lives of Japanese peasants who were so downtrodden that they were forbidden the dignity of legal family names until after 1867? McKibben thus approves of two societies in which technological progress was stifled for the benefit of their absolute rulers.

The third case cited by McKibben, the Amish, is different and proves the opposite of what he thinks it does. The Amish live in an open society -- ours -- and can opt out of our society or theirs whenever they want. They have a system for voluntarily deciding among themselves what new technologies they will embrace. But the fact that they live as they wish and select only the technologies they want dramatically undercuts McKibben's point. The Amish case shows that technological choices don't have to involve everyone in a given society.

Like the Amish, technophobes such as McKibben are free to say no to whatever technologies concern them. They do not have to genetically engineer their children or choose to live longer lives. McKibben should be content to allow the rest of us to use those technologies we believe will enhance and improve our lives and the lives of our children. McKibben's mantra is always, "More is not better." That's true, and it's completely beside the point: Better is better. And better, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

McKibben eschews "hyperindividualism" in favor of one of the most destructive and oppressive political metaphors ever propounded. He wants us to think of "the human species as one large individual organism." The individual meanings of our lives are to be subsumed into the larger meaning of the whole species. Never mind that in the last century ideologies founded on this organic principle of subordinating individual meaning to the good of the whole ended up killing tens of millions of people. It's no wonder that he shows affection for despotic regimes like Ming China and Tokugawa Japan.

Of course, McKibben says he's for democracy as a way of choosing which limits to put on technological progress. "Happily for us, we have a system for dealing with competing ideas," he says. "It's called politics. We will have to choose." But we don't have to choose; each one of us must be allowed to choose for himself.

No matter how advanced, technologies -- including genetic enhancement -- are not ends; they are means for individuals to build the best lives they can for themselves and their families.

Technological preferences, especially those that touch on the big issues of birth, disease, life, and death, are not democratic questions. They are personal questions. These private arenas should not be open to public decision making. For a man who says he favors human freedom and choice, McKibben is awfully eager to limit both.