This interview comes from "The Wild Duck Review:
http://www.wildduckreview.com/interviews/herbert.html
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Sophistry or Sensitive Science?" An Interview with Martha Herbert
Martha Herbert biography: Martha Herbert is a pediatric neurologist at
the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and at McLean Hospital in
Belmont MA, where she specializes in patients with learning and
developmental disorders. She is also Vice-Chair of the Board of
Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics. She received her
medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and
Surgeons, her pediatrics training at New York Hospital-Cornell
University Medical Center, and her neurology training at the
Massachusetts General Hospital, where she remains and is on the faculty
of the Harvard Medical School. At MGH she pursues research on brain
structure abnormalities in developmental disorders, particularly autism.
She also works on health and ecological risks of genetically modified
food, and on neurotoxins and brain development. Prior to her medical
training she obtained an interdisciplinary doctorate from the History of
Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, studying evolution and
development of learning processes in biology and culture.
Casey Walker: In your recent essay “Incomplete Science, The Body and
Indwelling Spirit,” you sketched the difference between a science
shaped by a “control-oriented, disconnected” belief system and a
science shaped by a “systems-modulating, context-sensitive” belief
system. What are these differences and why do they matter?
Martha Herbert: I don't believe we can adequately critique the
uses of engineering technologies if we don't understand the assumptions
driving them, just as we can't critique the life and physical sciences
if we don't understand the assumptions driving them. We seem to have no
problem understanding all other areas of inquiry, such as literature,
history, politics, philosophy, or economics, in the cultural settings
that generate them, yet fail consistently to question the same for
science.
Briefly and obviously, there is a world of difference—all too
literally!—between basing a scientific enterprise on the belief that a
sufficient scientific control over the body or nature will achieve an
end to human suffering, and basing a scientific enterprise on the belief
that the body or nature and all it expresses is our primary source for
learning how to live well.
The first, which I would call a “control-oriented,
disconnected” belief system, informs most of our recent powerful
technologies, from nuclear power, dams, pesticide development, and
psychopharmacology to genetic engineering. This belief system tends to
make negative assumptions about nature and the human body, suggesting
that both are essentially limited, imperfect, undifferentiated,
uninteresting, inherently inferior, and morally dismissable entities
awaiting the improvements of engineering technologies. Pests have no
purpose and should be obliterated; rivers that flood should be paved and
straightened; emotional pain is purely chemical and should be drugged.
Human suffering can and should be eliminated. Human “nature” is
viewed as essentially weak, nasty, selfish, greedy, and lustful, with
destructive anti-social impulses that should be controlled externally.
The wild spirits of children must be tamed by harsh discipline. The
body is a source of pain, appetite, sex, sickness, suffering, and death,
which should be fixed, escaped, or transcended. Similarly, the body's
pleasures are sinful, dangerous, and degrading and must be vigilantly
restricted. Spiritual beliefs consistent with this view of
disconnection and control invoke an authoritative deity remote from the
body, mind, or earth. Such beliefs aim for a salvation based on
transcendence or escape.
With the recent advent of biotech, nanotech, and infotech, we see
a techno-utopian expression of this belief system promoting
“exciting” projections for the future-physical “conquests” and
“upgrades” via Francis Bacon's notions of human designs escaping
natural limitations. Plants, animals, and babies can be engineered to
specifications we choose. The human brain can be enhanced by genetic or
synthetic engineering, and, indeed, the brain can be left completely
behind once we download it into a supercomputer. A limitless supply of
replaceable body parts will ensure immortality. On the face of it, this
vision appears less punitive and harsh than the control-oriented view of
nature and human nature, but in reality it would subvert both.
Cognition would be subverted into a mechanistic process, while bodily
sensuality and earthiness would be demeaned as immaturely coy, comic
book versions of super-sexual, super-muscular, super-sensory prowess.
In contrast, a “systems-modulating, context-sensitive” belief
system tends to make positive assumptions about nature and the
body—physical constraints are inherent to a flourishing corporeality
and, one could say, the artfulness of existence. This belief system
comprehends life as connected and emergent at a profound level that is
larger and more complex than we currently understand. While this
intricacy and complexity militates against promiscuous or wholesale
engineering, we may yet come to understand, engage with, and work with
life both elegantly and appropriately at its structural levels.
Organisms and ecosystems have capabilities that, when understood, can be
gently modulated toward greater articulation. And, while human
suffering can and should be minimized, it is nonetheless an ineluctable
condition of existence essential to developmental competencies and
maturation. Through experience and cultivated awareness, the inherent
drives of human nature for love, cooperation, curiosity, creativity, and
conviviality can mitigate fear-based defenses. Rage, impatience,
self-centeredness, greed, and other defenses caused by harmful
experiences (isolation, danger, deprivation, humiliation), can be
overcome under properly nourishing conditions. Indeed, the full
repertoire of the human body and mind is the very substance of a
robustly mature physical, mental, and spiritual life
Admittedly, these characterizations are highly polarized. Yet they
do intimate the wholly different worlds that can be created by two such
widely divergent belief systems. We live in a time when most of science
has been shaped by beliefs about nature and the body that are primarily
disconnected and control-oriented and that are supported by motives
based on fear and defensiveness. I think it is essential, therefore,
that large numbers of people quickly come to see the problem: In whose
hands do we entrust the power of manipulating the smallest genetic,
molecular, and atomic levels of living and inanimate matter?
It is also obvious to me that we are hugely mistaken if we believe the
first worldview is not dominant in the engineering sciences or is
capable of self-correction without confrontation. There isn't just a
misunderstanding between these worldviews, there is a basic conflict
about the nature of life and existence that is dangerously out of
balance. Even worse, the conflict is not in conflict. Where is
contention? Will you speak to the deafening silence in media and within
the scientific community?
To my mind, there's a dominant sophistry going on. Where is the
press for existing, complex system alternatives such as agroecology,
alternative medicine, or somatics—all of which work strategically
within whole systems, are locally variable, and are not patentable? I
had the opportunity to speak to the National Academy of Sciences last
spring on health monitoring of biotech food—which currently is not
being done at all and would be extremely difficult to do. After
sketching how hard it would be to trace or control the many infectious,
allergic, toxic, and other risks this technology poses, I asked my
listeners: “How can we know if genetic engineering offers the
techniques we really need to use, in spite of all the risks, when we
haven't seriously discussed alternatives? Why haven't we consulted
people who already argue convincingly, and with a lot of evidence, that
there are manyother ways to grow and produce all the foods we need?”
I suggested that if the National Academy of Sciences wanted to exercise
genuine scientific leadership, it would set up a serious dialogue
between biotech scientists and agroecology scientists. How does each
group define the problems, and how do they approach solutions? How
would each fare if they were compared rigorously and in good faith? I
don't think it would look so good for biotech—in fact, the kind of
genetic engineering currently employed would look pretty foolish.
One reason that molecular biologists are uncomprehendingly blind
to complex system oriented alternatives is that they have not been
required to study ecology or other higher level biological systems for
the last several generations. Of course, another problem with these
contextualized alternatives is that they can't be patented or
privatized. Insofar as industry gets interested in indigenous
knowledge, it takes the form of “biopiracy.” For example, industry
scouts will learn about herbs from a traditional shaman, identify some
active ingredient in the laboratory, patent it, market it, and give none
of the proceeds back to the shaman or the community where the knowledge
originated. Such industries also don't have much interest in the
complex cultural contexts in which the use of these herbs is
embedded-systems of understanding that are hard to patent and commodify,
and is less real to them, in any case, than genes or chemicals.
Imagine what it would mean for science if we didn't have our kind
of free-wheeling, intensely escalating, “win-lose” economic
pressure. If we could pour all the incredible resources that we're
currently wasting on toxic tech “fixes” into sustainable,
context-sensitive practices, we could live a lot more simply,
effectively, and ultimately more peacefully with one another and the
planet. It's a tragic waste that so-called economic imperatives have
forced the commercialization of molecular biology and genetics. We
could study molecular biology because it's remarkable and beautiful to
learn about these mechanisms, and not lose sight of the correctives that
come from remembering that these mechanisms operate in larger
frameworks.
The sin comes, as I see it, when we use incomplete knowledge to
make technological products for mass marketing-and with a hyped urgency,
at that. Once we turn these neat little laboratory tricks into products
(and one could say this is the essence of commercial biotechnology), we
are actively intervening in a system that we don't understand.
Technology gives us the power to devastate and to rape without first
requiring us to understand.
In “Dialogue on the Art of the Novel,” Milan Kundera raises Kafka's
question, “What possibilities remain for man in a world where the
external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses
no longer carry weight?” It's troublesome, isn't it, to extend that
question to: What possibilities remain if the external and internal
determinants for all living things become radically overpowered by
engineering projects and their unintended side effects? Will you speak
to what you are seeing as a pediatric neurologist, clinically and
professionally, in terms of internal change—the numbers and kinds of
cognitive, neurological, and behavioral disorders in children?
I think that we are witnessing change in the neurological wiring
of this generation of children
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This is quite long, here is the web site:
http://www.wildduckreview.com/interviews/herbert.html
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