The hubris of design

We’re on to Michael Sandel’s “Designer Children, Designing Parents,” and to the conclusion of Richard Powers’ “Walk on Air,” in Bioethics today.

It’s pretty much all downhill from here, for Thassa the hyperthymic cloudwalker. Whether it’s downhill for you and me (and the next generations of real humans) too, remains to be decided. Or so we we may hope. Tuesday’s news from Boston does not bode well, for that. But tomorrow’s? We’ll see. [Tips for Resilience in the Face of Horror: http://shar.es/JGgkY] 

“The problem lies in the hubris of the designing parents…” Indeed. I never tire of quoting Mr. Emerson: “You’re trying to create another you, one’s enough.” More than enough, too frequently.

On this note, may I interject: Older Daughter smashed an over-the-fence home run yesterday, for the first time in a stellar High School career. I may have been more thrilled than she, though she did report being “in shock.”

I was happy for us both. I introduced her to the game, while she was still in diapers. But I hope I never created the expectation that my love and favor were contingent on her fulfillment of my  dreams. She swung the bat, she cleared the fence, she gets to decide how big a deal that is. Period. I am not her engineer, and I have no claim on her success. (I do have a lot of vicarious pride, but that’s a different matter.)

Sandel speaks of parental love in two “aspects,” accepting and transforming.

Accepting love affirms the being of the child, whereas transforming love seeks the well-
being of the child… “Attachment becomes too quietistic if it slackens into mere acceptance… Parents have a duty to promote their child’s excellence.

But where to draw the line  between promotion and demand? Somewhere short of hyperparenting, surely. “Parents of college students are out of control.” Tell me about it. Then, stop me from joining them.

I texted my daughter last night that she needs to hit another dinger, for me, when I’m present. The season’s nearly through. Have I already crossed that line?

Another well-intentioned but problematic line crossed by too many: the ritalin solution to ADHD. (Or Adderall and the other designer drugs supposed to enhance attention and focus, “for buckling down” and “fitting in” and “complying” with the performance demands of a society that values productivity and efficiency over peace of mind and the traditional pace of childhood.)

The pace of childhood: does that phrase still signify? Do we still acknowledge a child’s right to self-discovery at her own direction and speed?

Bill McKibben has written sensibly about all this. In Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, he wonders if his marathon achievement is still his, “if my mind has been engineered to make me want to push through the pain of running, or not notice it at all.” He quotes Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future):

“Enhancements of this sort by parents [will] engender mindsets disinclined to attenuate the traits in their own children,” and so “such traits may reinforce themselves from generation to generation and push the limits of genetic possibility and technical know-how.”

McKibben: Because, that is, one late-twentieth-century woman found solace and meaning in playing the piano, her descendants yea unto the generations are condemned to an ever-deepening spiral of musicality, one that they did not choose and that may haunt them, depending on how much consciousness remains…

How much consciousness, and how much conscious pleasure in living?

We left Generosity with a gift-question:  imagine you’re in a deserted parking lot and $20 blows right in front of you.  There’s no one in sight to return it to. “How do you feel?”

“Good.”

Right. Now, imagine you fish in your pocket for that gift later and it’s not there.

You feel very bad. “The bad is crazily out of proportion to the good.”

Exactly. Nature selects for pessimists. We’ve got an uphill climb to our happiness.

Tell us something we didn’t know.

Well, did we all know that Richard Powers’ Make Your Writing Come Alive trope mirrors the writing and re-writing (“all writing is re-writing”) of genetic code? He and his narrative/authorial voice are so insistently present in this tale precisely because people like Gregory Stock have insisted that “our genetic future” is “inevitable.” Powers insists to the contrary that we don’t have to write the story just that way. Not yet.

Our atlas is still alight, though the flame gutters. Let’s not curse the darkness. Let’s light some more candles, dispatch the demons, and make our writing come alive.