Genetic Engineering and Eugenics: The Uses of History - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 134

underclass stretches back to Plato's Republic , whose guardian class
would be constantly purified through selection, and the elite restricted
from breeding with civilians. 36 It has since been a recurring theme in
utopian (and dystopian) fiction. 37 In The Time Machine , H. G. Wells
describes a future age in which humanity has split into two species, the
refined but decadent Eloi and the brutalized Morlocks. 38 This motif
seems to be again in vogue. For example, in Regeln für den Menschen-
park , the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk anticipates a division of
humanity into genetic engineers and the genetically engineered (zookeep-
ers and animals in the “human zoo”). Although Sloterdijk has been com-
pared with Adolf Hitler, his vision is actually much closer in spirit to
that of Plato or Bernal. That is also true of Princeton molecular biolo-
gist Lee Silver, whose Remaking Eden is a kind of free market analogue
to The World, the Flesh, and the Devil . Silver asks: “Why not seize the
power?” Noting that we now control children in all kinds of ways, he
suggests that using genetic engineering to this purpose is no different in
principle from sending them to computer camp or an expensive college
or providing all kinds of other advantages that we now find acceptable. 39
Bluntly conceding that the result will be to increase inequality, he pre-
dicts that in the distant future the species will break into two, the “gen-
rich” and the “normals.” Although the former “can trace their ancestry
back directly to homo sapiens , they are as different from humans as
humans are from the primitive worms with tiny brains that first crawled
along the earth's surface.” 40
That Haldane, Bernal, and Muller (at the time he wrote Out of the
Night ), were all Marxists should perhaps not be surprising. While avoid-
ing attribute-rich characterizations of human nature, Marxists assume
that there are needs and capacities that flow from our natural condition,
but also that in exercising these capacities, we transform ourselves.
According to the young Hegelians (including Karl Marx), we make our-
selves, and not just metaphorically. In transforming nature, we also trans-
form our capacities and sensibilities. That vision is strikingly expressed
by Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution . After reshaping the phys-
ical world, Trotsky writes,
Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. . . . The human species,
the coagulated homo sapiens , will once more enter into a state of radical trans-
formation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most compli-