Keith Hudson wrote:
>
> Hi Karen,
>
> Whenever one goes out on a limb, as I did yesterday in my piece ("Move
> over, America"), one immediately retreats mentally and wonders whether it's
> so. At least I do. For the rest of the day, as I went about my normal jobs,
> I wondered whether I had gone too far in saying that if America fails to
> develop the nascent technology of organ replacement then China might take
> over as the next economic power in the next decade or two.
>
> (I must also declare a personal interest in this matter because three of my
> grandchildren are triplet girls who were produced by in vitro fertilisation
> -- which I'll briefly return to later.)
>
> My case essentially depends on deciding just what the consumer demand might
> be if perfectly-matched organ replacements could be bought in order to
> prolong life. By the end of the day, after I had wobbled somewhat, I'd
> returned to my early morning view -- that this is almost certainly going to
> be the most sought-after product of all time (after food and water).
[snip]
I much hope that a technology of growing replacement organs
from stem cells (or even better: from raw reagent
inorganic chemicals) rapidly matures.
For the interim, I am concerned about new "moral opportunities":
Person X needs a kidney. I am a perfect match for X. If I
don't donate a kidney to X -- and prefereably thank
everyone for this opportunity to help my fellow man! --,
I will be shunned by the community and
"allowed" to die on a desert island after being publicly
put on display by President Bush, the Pope and Ken Lay as an example
of selfishness. (There are a few small benefits to having
no close living relatives, if, when they were
alive, they were "problems" -- it is sad to have such
a life, of course.)
I can almost quote Sophocles' words from his Ode to Man
in Antigone verbatim from memory
Many things are strange,
But strangest of all is man....
He wearies even the untiring earth,
By turning up the soil with his plows....
From every adversity he has made himself safe,
Escept from the last claim of death....
O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!
O fate of man, working both good and evil!
When the laws are kept, how proudly the city stands!
When the laws are broken, what of the city then?
He who, venturing high above his place,
Mistakes what it not for what is,
Loses his place in the end.
Never may the anarchic man frequent my hearth!
Never be it said that his thoughts are my thoughts!
And the exegesis of this text by perhaps the most
ambivalent person of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger,
in his _Introduction to Metaphysics_: Heidegger wrote there
that the strangest thing of all about
this strangest of all beings is that he finds
everything strange except for himself (i.e., the happenstance
folk customs of his own ethnicity).
We need to guide technology in the direction of
freeing us from "opportunities" to be moral, and
instead elaborate real opportunities
for us opportunities to create and
to play together ("luxe, calme et volupte...").
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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