A genetic engineer has created a mouse with ears that 
glow in the dark, by splicing firefly genes into mouse DNA.
More practically, transgenic pigs that freeze to death if left 
in the open because the human genes they've got don't let 
them accumulate fat, already make our bacon. Coming soon:
bespoke pig heart transplants in case the fat-free pig didn't 
help us avoid coronaries. I have been reading up on genes and 
transgenic science, and how the media handle it all. 

The stories and images arrive by stealth in our unconcscious
from inside the labs where evolution is being undone. They
ought to make your hair stand on end (when the journal Nature 
broke the story of Dolly the cloned sheep -- 'More important 
than Darwin, Einstein and Copernicus together!' -- its graphic 
designers airbrushed one leg black, to make the thing look more 
cuddly. They forgot a cloned sheep whose 'parent' has four white 
legs can itself only have four white legs).

These images of biotech at work are mostly like that: not stark tekno,
but homely flesh-tones: a bowl of rice, an ear of wheat, cheerful rodents 
made literally anthropomorphic, like the mouse with a human ear growing 
on its back.  Oh, cute!

These images condition us to accept something more terrible than 
anything Himmler, Pol Pot or Mengele did. None of them managed to rob 
their victims of their humanity. We can feel pity and terror for the 
hollow-eyed, numbered prisoners of Tuol Sleng, but a mouse with
luminous ears? You cannot pity the loss of something that was never
there in the first place. This not a living thing, it is quasi-alive,
it is just an agglomeration of high-spec cells which happens to move
around and stare vacantly. Now, just as the first slaves were modelled
on the first domesticated animals (hunter-gatherers do not enslave)
so the first not-human humans, or bits of humans, will be modelled 
on the mice with the ears. Headless humans grown from our own nail
parings for our own transplants. Androids like in Dick's 60's classic,
the basis of Blade Runner. 

They have no rights _by design_. That's different from just *saying* 
to someone: 'You have no rights,' as the Nazis did.

Sometimes they will just be bits of protein-computer embedded in domestic
appliances but sometimes they will be just like us. Then Scientology
will rule the world, because how will we imagine ourselves, distinguish
ourselves from the Wogs, except as trillion-year old Thetans inhabiting 
living corpses, as Scientologists think they are (everyone else is a 
'Wog', in L. Ron Hubbard-speak. Andrei Kiriyenko, the new Russian prime 
minister-designate with the robotic voice, is said to be a Scientologist, 
so his was an inspired choice of Yeltsin's, now all Russians are Wogs).

The Nazis were a colourful, queer flop. Denying the humanity of 
victims  ludicrously achieved nothing except a lurid posterity 
and fashions for patent knee boots and black jodhpurs. You could 
not actually efface a Jew's humanity (of course, people can get 
used to anything: During  WW2, a popular brand of soap in Polish 
shops was labelled 'RJF', meaning 'Pure Jewish Fat').

On the contrary; the camps affirmed the value of life. 
E P Thompson said the Prussian goose-step always made him think of a 
boot descending on a face. The face becomes our own kin, the boot 
makes the victim the centre of our world. If only they'd figured a 
way to make Jewish ears flash like diodes in the night. 

All a mouse wants is the right to BE a mouse. You can kill it in
a trap but at least you know it was a mouse. With ears that glow 
in the dark, this is not-mouse, nothing more, an aberration, a 
pathological joke at nature's and our expense.

Tthe joke won't stop there. It started long ago, during the 
LAST global warming when the seas rose, the ice melted and 
the present interglacial began. Tides flooded the land bridges, 
the permafrost turned to impassable sludge and made our free-
roaming ancestors into miserable, arthritic swamp-dwellers
who had to cultivate grain and domesticate animals to survive
(check out Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'). That
was when the comedy started.

Peter Dickens in his 1992 book 'Society  And Nature: Towards
A Green Social Theory', describes the moral universe of the Yanomani,
with its spirit-world that is coterminous with the tribe, with 
its rites and shamans, its two-hour working day, its playfulness. 

Anyone who has consulted the literature on shamanism sees the 
same themes everywhere where humans lived immersed within nature, 
not trying to domesticate it and themselves. The hunter apologises 
to the animal he kills, propitiates the anger of its departing
soul, promising it will return stronger and more beautiful next 
time around. The shaman dresses in the animal's skin, becomes it
and forgives the tribe. The webs that connect all living
things are rendered whole and seamless. The anger of the 
ancestors is propitiated and the spirits of each tree, river, 
rock, of the night stars and the seasons, greeted.

Once you start to domesticate animals the process of desacralising
nature is set in motion, and the only thing that might stop it is to
abandon settled, surplus-gathering culture and revert to hunting
and gathering. So the fate of our world was decided with the first
woman (it was certainly a woman) to plant the first row of seeds
in one furrow, and the first man who turned a wolf into a dog and
a boar into a pig.

The prophanisation of nature has obviously now been consummated
and Nature capital N, as Bill McKibben says, has been abolished
and will never come back, except in our guilty dreams. This gives me
the ultimate answer to Euroecentric notions about science. As Joseph
Needham points out in 'Moulds of Understanding', Christianity
was always more primtive than its rivals: Islam, Taoism,
Buddhism -- because these world-religions were humanist
at the core, and were about reconnecting the human with the world,
and resacralising Nature (a particularly strong theme in Islam and
in Indian religions).

Not so Christianity, which never rose out of its primitive origins 
in superstition and magic (or perhaps its Judaic nomothetic basis
clashed so violently with the pantheistic paganism of the northern
tribes that the result was a bastard, pastiche religion, a barbaric 
pageant incapable of any gnostic self-transcendence: shamanism without
nature (does not the Bishop were a skin?), God without Reason. 

The Christian act of faith in the Resurrection is not required 
of the Muslim. This bit of obscurantism (resurrection from death)
creates a schism between the material world and its 
Creator. Functionally, the policing of such beliefs also explained the
rigid orthodocy and murderous intolerance of the early medieval
latin church; this monotheism created a monolithic European culture
quite unlike the thriving communities of the Arabo-Persian world, where
Jews, Muslims and Christians lived cheerfully side by said (along with
Zoroastrians, and even Confucianists).

When Bacon imported Chinese and Islamic science, one of two things
became historically inevitable: either the Church would destroy science,
which after Copernicus' heliocentrism was confirmed by Galileo, became
an obvious enemy to orthodoxy; or a mutually-agreed divorce between
church and science would happen. Both processes were evident, 
but we know which won out. And the church's divorce from science
was not so hard to effect, really: that obscurantism at the heart of
latin christianity concealed what soon became the well-known materialism
of Counter-Reformation theology: since God created the world, it must exist,
be material, and obey the physical laws God imbued in it. This
quite dubious speculation soon assumed a dogmatic, positivist certainty
which underlay science until Einstein. No other historic culture shared it.

Alternative Christianities were possible but they always
lacked the totalising zeal of the Latins even when they had
the wealth and power to assert themselves. Thus the millions of
Nestorians in their communities strung out along the Silk Roads 
from Damascus to Beijing were the wealthiest Christians in the
world. Their bishops advised Genghis-khan and converted most of 
his family, but they never pressed home their advantage and when 
the Mongols chose a state religion it was Islam. The Nestorians 
shared the Muslims easy-going humanism - they did not believe in 
the Holy Trinity, without which of course, the notion of a Risen 
Christ becomes both impossible and unnecessary.

The moral, philosophical and theological caesurae in the latin
church explain why (according to Needham) science was possible in the
Christian west but not in China or Islam, which were incapable of 
prophanising Nature. The Chinese remained prescientific but in Europe, 
descralising Nature allowed the sciences to be launched in their Baconian, 
faustian form. The reduction of human nature too, was just a matter 
of time. 

Nothing is really new. Victor Hugo wrote a famous novel about 
the child-procurers for medieval kings, men who understood 
which glands to cut and organs to remove in order to create
different functional dwarves (for service at table, sexual 
service, espionage), or eunuchs (tall, gangly, intellectual 
mandarins, wrathful soldiers: the Chinese navy had fleets 
whose entire complements from admiral to rating, were castrates); 
eunuchs had no family ambitions, were greedy on the king's  behalf
etc.

Nevertheless, despite all the anticipations and prefigurings
history offers -- barbarism, mutilation, the denial of fellowship, 
the effacing of the humanity of the weak and the poor by the
powerful and rich, I think it is clear that we stand on the threshold of 
something qualitatively new. It is not just that our senses have 
become so brutalised that the image of a mouse with a human ear 
growing on its back or with luminous ears, only makes us laugh, 
just as Germans once laughed at Jews, no, it's worse. With great 
eagerness to explore what lies behind it, we have forced
open the door of hell and rushed inside.

It is not just inevitable, it is presumably already happening, 
somewhere, in some terrible place: the creation of beings
devoid of purpose, sense of self or destiny, wich, unlike mice, 
may be conscious of all that (this is torture worse than domesticated 
animals feel, because at least a never suspects it's anything else 
whatever it's circumstances). Hard to imagine the despair an entity 
might experience if its only consciousness of self is that it has 
none.

How will we interface with this highly productive, profitable, beneficial,
useful, desirable world of black biology and terminal moral squalor which 
is already upon us? How will we save ourselves from being unselved by it?

Food shortage, disease, eco-collapse, and social disintegration will
conjoin with the mindless egotism of wealthy transplant and brain enhancement 
clients, and while the planet cooks the talk will all be of downloading
ourselves (BT, the British comms provider, actually has an R&D unit called
'SoulCapture'). Converging in the general onrush will be systems that 
interconnect protein-based computers which have all, some or none of 
the attributes of their remote (human) DNA-ancestors, with systems, 
anthropoid or other, conscious or not, connecting DNA to electro-mechanical 
and nano-scale hardware, to semi-liveware, to the faustian/Mary Shelley 
dreamworld. The greed of the North, the cataclysms of the South, and the 
need to save something, somehow, will fuel the whole lurching thing, and 
none of us will think it matters, any more than it mattered when someone 
made a pink mouse with luminous ears.

Mark



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