Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The choice confronting us is therefore clear. Either we acquiesce to a
biological determinism crafted along cybernetic lines, much as we have
drifted into tacit approval of genetically modified food; or we resist the
thoughtless equations of freedom with technical control and wisdom
with technical expertise. The second option, if we take it, will not be an
easy haul. It will demand a more cautious if not skeptical approach to
our technologies, especially those coming under the rubric of bioengi-
neering. And this, in turn, will depend on the cultivation of an episte-
mological tolerance for the insurmountable indeterminacy and hence
mystery of what still stands at the center of our historicity as its ground
and stabilizing force: the individual
thing
, both natural and artifactual,
in all its particularity and opaque otherness. Above all, we will need to
learn, odd as it may sound, what it means to be at home in our home-
lessness, and so to thrive in a world that despite our best efforts and no
matter how powerful our techniques can be made neither wholly com-
fortable nor ultimately reassuring. The alternative—which admittedly
has the upper hand because it has been long prepared for—is the emer-
gence of a cybernetic humanity whose threat, not just to the thingly basis
of the world, but to its own spontaneity and the spontaneity of future
generations, we now seem unwilling, even unable, to recognize. But igno-
rance, though constitutive of our human condition, has never been an
excuse and, as the Greeks have taught us, is the essence of tragedy itself.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the crank, see Lynn White Jr.,
Medieval Technology and
Social Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 103-117. For a
classic account of the clock, see Lewis Mumford,
Technics and Civilization
(New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 12-18.
2. Lynn White, Jr.,
Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), ix.
3. John Locke indicates the cultural power of this idea in “Of Property,” chapter
5 of
The Second Treatise on Government
, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis:
Hachett Publishing, 1980). There he appeals to Revelation, “which gives us an
account of those grants God made of the world to Adam, and to Noah and his
sons” (18), and specifically interprets Psalm 115—where King David sings that
God “has given the earth to the children of men” (18)—to mean that God “com-
manded [man] to subdue the earth—i.e., improve it for the benefit of life and
therein lay out something that was his own, his labor” (21), For a more recent
