Second Spring

On Transplanting Heads

Without the guidance of a humane philosophy, modern science is becoming an instrument of the culture of death

Stratford Caldecott

In an interview reported by a leading British newspaper, Dr Robert White, a devout Catholic member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and co-founder of "the John Paul II committee on medical ethics," recently spoke of his success in transplanting heads. This has involved only the heads of monkeys thus far, but he believes what he prefers to call a "total body transplant" for humans is perfectly feasible, once the technical difficulty of reconnecting the spinal cord is overcome, as inevitably it will be.
"The Holy Father has never voiced any objection," Dr. White adds. "As far as I know, there isn't a problem with the operation from a theological or ethical point of view." Another Catholic medical ethicist is quoted as saying, "The religious objections are essentially practical. They center on things such as the effects on the donor's relatives of his body being attached to a different head."
Imagine all those hours of research, cutting off the heads of perfectly healthy monkeys and sewing them onto other bodies. Is there not something cruel and unwholesome about this macabre procedure? Would I be prepared to accept my wife's head on someone else's body, if it was the only way to save her life? Would she? In England we call it the "yuck factor," and it seems to be the only thing standing in the way of research which many scientists would advocate with enthusiasm. Year by year, our resistance is eroded, and what once seemed grotesque or bizarre is accepted as normal.
But is there more than a subjective basis for our instinctive reaction of horror? This is where philosophy comes in. Philosophy may originate with philosophers, but it soon percolates through to street level. What we call "common sense" is often only the impacted sedimentary layer of generations of unexamined ideas, ideas that fall from the air to be absorbed by anyone who lacks a proper defence against them. "I think everyone accepts," says Dr White, "that personality lies in the brain. That's where your memory, your character, your individuality, lies."
In the same newspaper, the same day (which was not April 1st), Professor Igor Aleksander of Imperial College, London, speaks about the world's first "conscious" machine: a laptop computer with "free will," which was unveiled at the Science Museum on December 17, 1996. The computer's name is Magnus, and it is the result of six years' research into "neural networks." Instead of being programmed to solve problems, Magnus was taught to learn by example, its networks hooked up together like neurons in the human brain and let loose to explore simulated worlds. It behaves as if it was consciously choosing between alternatives, and solves problems not previously encountered. Is it conscious? Shall we ask it?
Future shock
Imagine a world only a few years into our future, in which diseases and disability incurable today can be eliminated by microengineering techniques applied to the human embryo, egg, or sperm. The trade in sperm and its genetic "enhancement" will have become a massive industry. Children, conceived outside the human body, can be gestated in surrogate wombs. Recently a woman in England gave birth to her own granddaughter, to a flurry of amused reaction in the press. But forget grandmothers; when the first artifical womb goes on sale, what is to stop men becoming mothers? Who will deny them that right?
Thousands of unwanted frozen embryos are destroyed each year in Britain: soon it will be millions. In this nearest of futures, to have a child, with or without a partner, and to have a particular kind of child (boy or girl, tall or short, good at music or basketball) will be a matter of choice--for the rich. Detached from reproduction, sex is already beginning to evolve into an experience ofvirtual reality. Soon human bodies will be wired in such a way as to enable anyone to enter an amusement arcade and experience "perfect sex" with a variety of partners.
Widen the focus slightly. A few years hence, foodstuffs will mostly have been genetically engineered to provide predictable quality, resistance to decay and disease, and an exotic variety of flavors. They may also be enhanced with chemicals to improve human performance. Advertisements will proclaim that a particular brand of soup improves your memory. Other human skills such as arithmetic or physical coordination may be improved by the implantation of bioelectric chips in the brain. Access to the World Wide Web will be direct: no need for a keyboard, just a plug in the brain.
Increasingly, human beings are living in entirely artificial environments. For many, "home sweet home" is already little more than an enclosed entertainment and communication system. Outside, as this trend continues, environmental destruction by warfare, industrial accident, uncontrolled consumerism, or sheer bad planning continues. As the environment degenerates, a whole generation will begin to take seriously the idea of discarding the natural world altogether and emigrating to cyberspace, in a kind of parody of Gnostic liberation.
Meanwhile, of course, the poor in our own society and elsewhere will continue to reproduce and be born in the old way. Physical handicap, ugliness or other "imperfections" will be read as a sign of poverty. It will be generally accepted that the old, the incurably sick, and the infirm should permit us to take their lives (painlessly, of course) in order to relieve economic pressures on the young and the fit. To compensate for the successful eradication of many diseases, we may expect new plagues. And of course high-tech terrorism will leads to demands for a transnational police force to combat growing social anarchy. It will become impossible to evade surveillance from satellites and sensors. Every transaction will be recorded, every human exchange monitored. cannot now avoid practicing eugenics, simply by virtue of the fact that they know too much about the likely consequences of allowing one child rather than another to come to term. Just as physicists lost their innocence at the explosion of the first atomic bomb (as Oppenheimer put it, "we have known sin"), so the biologists have lost theirs with the Human Genome Project. But how did we get ourselves into this situation? The history of scientific endeavor is popularly presented as a triumphant (and inevitable) progression from the darkness of superstition to the full light of rational inquiry. A cursory glance might reveal a rather different and more complex picture. Today no less than yesterday, scientific inquiry is partly channelled and directed by social conditions and by largely unconscious motivations. We get the science we deserve. At the simplest level, merely because scientists require to be paid, patronage has played a role no less important in the history of science than in that of the arts, helping to determine what will be studied and what kinds of technology will be developed. Let us, then, take a fresh look at the history of science, and begin to free our imaginations from the cage of modernity.
The birth of science as observed by the naked eye was a book of symbols waiting to be read; it was an act of self-expression by God, a theophany imbued throughout with the intelligibility of the divine Logos. For the medieval mind the appearances of things provided natural support for the act of contemplation, the exploration of "inner space" by the development not of material instruments but of faculties for spiritual perception in the observer.
During the 16th and 17th centuries science was transformed into an activity with a definite practical purpose. Individual scientists may still have been motivated largely by innocent curiosity and a love of the beauty revealed in creation by intellectual inquiry, but the scientific enterprise became increasingly concerned with the subjugation of the natural realm to the service of man (an effort which had traditionally been the goal of the magician). The change in attitude is usually attributed to Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The realization of Bacon's vision became possible through the experimental method (foreshadowed in the work of his namesake, the Franciscan Roger Bacon), when this was combined with the mathematicization of science brought about by Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and finally Newton. The new method offered results and benefits of an eminently practical kind.
It is interesting to speculate whether modern science could have developed without breaking from the philosophical tradition that stems from Aristotle. That break had negative as well as positive consequences. It seems to have taken place well before Bacon, with the nominalist philosophers of the 14th century, for whom no "universals" or underlying essences (including moral universals or the natural law) could exist except as illusions evoked in the mind by the use of names. By separating real from rational entities, science from faith, God from nature, and Church from State, it was William of Ockham as much as anyone who destroyed natural theology and metaphysics. He freed the scientist from a blind subservience to the authority of Aristotle, and that was indeed a liberation; but at the same time he set our feet on a road that led by a series of stages to the philosophical wasteland of modernity --to dualism, idealism, and positivism. in whose image modern man has fashioned himself. The effect of nominalism was to eliminate the entire "vertical" or "interior" dimension of reality--the dimension of metaphysical form, final causality, and divine providence--and with that, virtually the last remaining possibility of a contemplative science. With the loss of the sense of the world's interiority, its rational coherence could only be maintained by supposing a strict conformity with mathematical laws, imposed from without by the Creator or else subsisting eternally without reason. The consciousness of the observer was no longer recognized as an intrinsic part of reality, and was soon relegated to the realm of the merely subjective, along with all those "secondary qualities" that did not lend themselves to objective measurement. Science had been transformed into a search for the mathematical models sufficient to account for the motion and transformation of matter.
The evolution of Darwinism
In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin extended the new scientific method to the human and social sciences, emphasizing the continuity between animate and inanimate matter, between animal and human life. The basis for his theory of natural selection consisted in the idea that "favorable individual variations"--favorable, that is, to survival--arising by "happy accident" must be "transmitted by heredity from generation to generation". Evolution (a term that originally belonged to Herbert Spencer) seemed to him at first a highly inappropriate tag for his theory, implying the unfolding of something already in existence rather than the development of entirely new forms. For what Darwin was concerned to establish above all was the possibility that life and order could develop spontaneously in matter. He was determined to eliminate the ancient idea of the "final cause," or any explanation in terms of purpose, and with it the possible recourse to a divine creation of species.
After Darwin, the various animal species, so carefully catalogued by Linnaeus and his successors, could no longer be held to correspond with eternal essences or forms. In true nominalist fashion, they had simply become names. There was nothing therefore to prevent a gradual change from one category to another, as each new generation diverged from its predecessors. Hence the fervor with which Darwin in his correspondence with Charles Lyell defended the idea of gradualism against any suggestion that species (including the human species) might have originated by leaps and bounds--or what we would call sudden mutation.
The controversy resurfaces in our own day. Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "punctuated equilibrium" seems to imply a reality to the species as distinct from the individual members of the species. Gould's opponents, such as Daniel Dennett, view this idea with the greatest suspicion--even when it is couched in terms that suggest a purely material explanation for the "species essence" itself. Dennett's suspicions are easy to understand. Either the resemblances between individuals "create" the archetypes (as in nominalism), or the archetypes are responsible for the resemblances (as in the many forms of Platonism).
The Church has firmly resisted endorsing any account of human origins that would eliminate the spiritual dimension. In his recent controversial speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II reflected on the modern theory (or, as he was careful to point out, theories) of evolution in relation to Christian faith. In 1950, the encyclical Humani Generis of Pope Pius XII considered "evolutionism" a hypothesis to be taken seriously as far as it applied solely to the origin of the body, but not if it was taken to contradict the revealed truth that the spiritual soul of each and every human person is directly created by God. John Paul II reaffirmed: "theories of evolution which, in accordance with the [materialistic] philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person."
The Pope speaks of an ontological leap from animal to man, a transition to the spiritual. The "sciences of observation", he points out, cannot be expected to do more than "describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line." The "experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again, of aesthetic and religious experience" falls within the competence not of science but of philosophy, while theology "brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator's plans," thus complementing and crowning the work both of observation and of philosophy.
The Pope, in other words, makes a clear distinction among three levels of reflection. He makes it clear that the philosophical element in any scientific theory must be judged by the methods of philosophy, and furthermore that it cannot be completely detached from a theological perspective, however unconscious.
The need for a new cosmology being to worry about. To anyone who has, consciously or unconsciously, accepted nominalist assumptions this appears irrefutable. Nominalism, in a certain sense, is at the root of the culture of death. Maybe, therefore, philosophical arguments are more important than most of us realize. Maybe it is in departments of philosophy that the battle for the soul of our civilization is being fought--and the outcome, at least in the short term, is uncertain.
Historically, we have arrived at a moment of choice: the choice between a culture of life and a culture of death. The former is a culture that, however far it may fall short, is at least turned toward God; the latter is a culture where man tries to take God's place, and in so doing dissolves the very foundations of love. With the elimination of natural purposes and providential design from the universe it becomes our role to supply the goals and provide the design for nature. That includes, of course, the nature of our children. In a culture of death, the only question is how quickly the choice of what kind of child we want can be placed entirely in the hands of the "consumer"--that is, the parent. For it is by placing responsibility for selection on the parent, and thus diffusing it throughout the market, that any inconvenient or emotive association between the new eugenics and the Nazi death camps can best be avoided.
C.S. Lewis long ago saw it coming --the temptation to take control of evolution ourselves. As he wrote in The Abolition of Man: