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For his students this was, if anything, even more
upsetting. To say that Dr. Kass was a highly
popular professor goes only a short distance in
conveying the awe in which he was held. His
seminars--deeply serious excursions into the book
of Genesis, Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics,"
Plato's "Meno," Descartes's "Discourse on the
Method," and other Western classics--served as a
kind of church in which we came to understand that
one could not be intellectually respectable
without being morally so. This was news to most of
us, but it gave us a reputation that we tried,
with typical Chicago earnestness, to live up to.
So we were unprepared to discover that our
admiration for our professor was not universally
shared. Far from it. "The mere mention of Leon
Kass makes my nose wrinkle," says one acquaintance
of mine. "There is nothing moderate about Kass,"
adds Virginia Postrel, former editor of Reason
magazine, who describes him as a representative
"of an extreme point of view . . . among the
purest and most honest, but still presentable,
proponents of social, economic, and technological
stasis."
This view of Dr. Kass is, at the very least,
shallow. "There's a thoughtlessness in describing
[debates about new technologies such as stem-cell
research] as a battle between freedom, optimism
and prosperity on the one hand, and
backward-looking superstition and nostalgia on the
other," he says. "Anyone who lives in our time and
is hostile to technology is self-deceived and a
hypocrite." Yet, he adds, "where you have
technologies that touch so deeply on the nature of
our humanity, [decisions about their use]
shouldn't be left to a kind of technological
fatalism and free markets."
On balance, however, Dr. Kass does tend to lean
toward the ancients in their battle with the
moderns. Despite holding an M.D. and a doctorate
in biochemistry from Harvard, and having been a
researcher at the National Institutes of Health,
he has spent much of his career raising seemingly
abstruse moral objections to the whole thrust of
the modern scientific enterprise--what Francis
Bacon grandly called "the relief of man's estate."
Thus he has questioned the uses of in vitro
fertilization; opposed the substitution of the
Hippocratic Oath--with its injunction against
abortion--with the American Medical Association's
more anodyne version; decried the growing
acceptability of euthanasia; and, most recently,
argued strenuously against even basic research
into human cloning. A recent article of his in The
New Republic is unsparing of the "cheering claque
of sci-fi enthusiasts, futurologists, and
libertarians" who favor any new technology so long
as it marches under the banner of capital-P
Progress.
At the core of Dr. Kass's thinking is the view
that "we should bequeath to our children a world
in which human dignity can flourish no less than
human health." Human health is, of course, an
uncontroversial, largely measurable good. But it
is not the only good, and Dr. Kass has been a
relatively isolated voice explaining the ways in
which a culture that is narcissistically obsessed
with personal "wellness" may lose sight of more
important human goods and principles. These
include love and friendship, "a certain kind of
awe and reverence for the mystery of life," a
conviction that "life is lived most fully and
joyously when one understands that it is finite,"
and, not least, a sense of the divine.
Such arguments--informed by readings of the Hebrew
Bible, Plato and Aristotle, and Rousseau--are, in
many ways, persuasive. Yet it is easy to see why
they might have trouble gaining currency.
"Dignity," after all, is a contested term, which
citizens of a liberal-democratic republic reserve
the right to define for themselves. In arguing,
for instance, for a ban on human cloning, Dr. Kass
suggests that some restraints ought to be put on
our freedom to avoid the slide toward what he
calls a "post-human world."
While most Americans would likely agree with his
verdict on cloning, one wonders whether employing
the discourse of virtue is the best way to
persuade a mass audience.
As it is, it is not Dr. Kass's intention to serve
as the country's "ethics cop," as he was recently
described in a profile in Time magazine. "The task
that's been assigned to us," he says, "is not to
make arrests and catch scientists. The task is to
clarify the issues, to lift the public
understanding of the human and moral significance
of doing what we're doing." His council, he
promises, will not be "stacked with like-minded
people."
This is to the good, and should help mollify those
who might otherwise be disposed to dismiss any
verdicts issuing from the "Kass Council." But in
the end, this is going to be his show. Provided he
can make his case in a way Americans understand,
the country will, morally speaking, be the richer
for it.
By Bret Stephens
[Note: Mr. Stephens is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.]
Source: Pro-Life Infonet
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