Report on History, Eugenics and Human Enhancement
History, Eugenics and Human Enhancement, a 1-day conference convened by Andrew Moeller (Faculty of History, Oxford), Jose Maria Andres Porras (UNC), and Alberto Giubilini (Uehiro Oxford Institute), took place on 24th March, at the Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre in St Anne’s College. Co-organised by the Boundaries of Humanity Project (Stanford), TORCH Medical Humanities (Oxford), and the Uehiro Oxford Institute (Oxford), it was a thematically vast and ambitious event, with four panels and a debate. It brought together specialists and scholars from several disparate and allied fields, including history, medicine, medical ethics, law, philosophy and science and technology studies (STS). Organised around the question of how the past can “help us inform ethical debates in the present”, the conference explored both the possibilities and the difficulties embedded in such an endeavour.
The first panel, focussing on human enhancement and the European Middle Ages, included presentations by Jose Maria Andres Porras and Meagan S. Allen (Johns Hopkins). While Porras’s presentation focussed on a 14th-century medical treatise which discussed how politicians could ensure that parents could procreate “good and perfect children”, Allen’s presentation discussed the idea of prolongatio vitae or prolongation of life, an idea popular in the Middle Ages and central to the thought of the Franciscan Roger Bacon.
Focussing on the ways in which his text differentiated between “positive eugenics” and “negative eugenics”, Porras’s presentation highlighted how, historically, it was written in the context of scarce resources, which meant that the text was also concerned with questions of overpopulation—of more “useless mouths”—and the need for sustainability. To this effect, the text also explored themes such as the social “value” of a life, differentiating between the kind of lives that needed to be created, sustained and nurtured, while others which had no place/utility and thus needed to be eliminated—such as the disabled, the old and the infirm, or the morally derelict, who, on the basis of their psychological constitution, could not be, as the text argued, bettered. Significantly, then, the presentation argued, the measure of necessity could be physical and/or moral, and the line between the two was not fixed. In discussing this text, the presentation thus raised important questions about the abiding and enduring tension between nature and nurture, and highlighted certain ethical questions societies, economies and political systems still grapple with today—what is the measure of a good life? At what point does a life become a “burden”? Who is the arbiter of such categories?
Allen’s presentation, on the other hand, problematised the often-assumed notion that there is an historically continuous human desire for immortality. Her presentation showed, instead, that in the Middle Ages, although there was a notion that human life used to be longer in the past, but had, due to Original Sin, been shortened, immortality itself was not essentially desired. This was not because such a desire was essentially impossible to bring into physical fruition, but because of a theological stance which connected the soul to the body, and modification of one could not take place independently of the other. In other words, even if the limits of the body could be modified, the body was connected to the soil, which had also been compromised by sin. Her presentation also discussed alchemical medicines which were meant to deal with the body “holistically”, improving mental as well as physical health. In discussing the ways in which the limits of life were thus negotiated, the presentation historicised larger questions around the human desire for and the possibilities of extending life and explored the relationship between the physical and spiritual boundaries of humanity.
The second panel included presentations by Andrew Moeller and Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes). While Moeller’s presentation looked to provide a framework for conceptualising the utility of history and the historian to contemporary debates over human enhancement, Turda’s talk made a case for looking at how history is useful tool to help understand the practice and perseverance of eugenic practices in the present. Both these presentations were more prescriptive than thematic, offering roadmaps on how to negotiate the limitations and possibilities of certain disciplines and concepts.
Moeller’s presentation focussed on the idea of history as the “wisdom of lived experience”. It used the metaphor of history as a grandparent to whom one goes to for advice; their advice may not exactly correspond to the exigencies of the now, but it would not be alien either, and might bring forth similarities, overlaps and even perspectives hitherto unconsidered by the person asking from the vantage point of the present. Highlighting the consequent play of difference and continuities evidenced through cross-generational advice, a case was made for the potential use of history in addressing concerns of the present. While acknowledging the complexities of negotiating such an act of comparison and transposition, the presentation also acknowledged the “tension at the heart of historical analysis”, the tension between “continuity and change”. However, this, it was argued, was more a generative tension which allowed more than it constrained.
Turda’s presentation, on the other hand, focussed on the need for historicizing eugenic practices by looking at the cultural and political conditions which allowed for these ideas to emerge, develop and be deployed. Doing so, it was argued, was necessary, in order to find the “lingering fragments” of such practices and thoughts which exist today, and thereby expose them. Focussing on the protean nature of eugenics, it highlighted the ways in which ideas, concepts and practices of difference and discrimination travelled and continue to travel in the present. Viewing the legacies of the eugenics in the modern world, it argued for a more palimpsestic reading of the past and the present, one in which the past and the present were not only co-dependant, but also co-constituted, enmeshed and entangled with one another.
This discussion of lingering fragments led to the third panel, which included presentations by Alex Aylward (Oxford) and Heloise Robinson (Oxford), focussed on asking whether eugenics was still with us in the present, and if so, in what form. While Aylward’s presentation analysed the idea of how, if at all, eugenics met an “end”, Robinson’s presentation questioned the neutrality of the state and looked at how eugenic practices of coercion and selection were actuated by certain laws, provisions and government in the context of prenatal testing.
Aylward’s presentation showed how a certain combination of institutional apparatuses and political choices and conditions had made possible the categorisation of eugenics as a “science”. Shifting the focus away from the question of facticity and method, or even whether eugenics was a “correct science” from a theoretical perspective, it highlighted the way in the “end” of eugenics was a question forged between the tensions of disproving and disapproval. Rather than the “end” of eugenics being a victory of “correct science”, it traced the ways in eugenics “ended” when certain political changes led to eugenics becoming a “disapproved” science, which kept the door open for its possible return in the future. Given that the “end” of eugenics was a result of political will and institutional dismantling, its return was termed “eugenics reconfigured”. This new, reconfigured form was made possible through newer institutional assemblages and political changes, albeit through new, emergent disciplines such as population science, demography, genetic counselling and mobility studies.
Robinson’s presentation, on the other hand, analysed the ways in which practices such as Preimplantation Genetic Testing (PGT) and abortion laws place themselves within larger debates of reproductive autonomy and coercion. She argued that although it is generally assumed that the state is neutral when it comes to such laws and practices, analysing the ways in which funding choices and decisions took place or the ways in information regarding disability and maternal health complications were shared by the state, or the cost-benefit analyses advocated for these decisions, for instance, made it clear that the state was not a neutral figure, but one that was pushing for the preference of certain kinds of choice, and of certain kinds of life over others. In this way, the presentation argued that eugenic practices of selection and difference continue today, rewriting narratives of inclusion and exclusion; Yet the crucial difference lies in the fact that the modern state worked not through coercion but rather through information manipulation, with women on the receiving end.
The fourth panel included presentations by Keith Lemna (Saint Meinrad Seminary) and Carlos Lopez-Beltran (National Autonomous University of Mexico). While Dr. Lopez-Beltran’s presentation focused on the long history and racial purity, mixing, and inheritance in South America and its continuation in the present, Dr. Lemna focused and contrasted the views of Dietrich von Hildebrand with those of Martin Heidegger in the context of phenomenology and human perfection.
Lopez-Beltrain’s presentation discussed how the idea of “inherited stock” mediated race relations as well as the physical, cultural and moral interactions between the European colonisers and the native South American populations during the period of colonial invasion which was followed by a slave trade. This interaction gave fillip to notions of blood purity in the Iberian Peninsula, devaluing local bodies and perpetuating the idea of “casta”. Successive waves of invasion and settlement led to “Hippocratic bodies” of natives being constantly evaluated in terms of perfectionism and degeneration, leading to different categories of mixed-race individuals, each with their own physical, cultural and moral associations. Within this matrix, the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood created the Mestizo, the Spanish and the Mestizo created the Castizo, the Spanish and the Castizo, in turn, led to a “return” to the original, white, Spanish racial self. The presence of African blood, on the other hand, in one’s ancestry, was associated with atavistic notions of animality. Returning to the present, it was argued that these notions morphed into forms of scientific racism and perfected national citizenship perpetuated by the modern neoliberal state, where more “indigenous” traits were pathologized, subject to disappearance and demographic substitution by the preference of whiteness. This preference of the Mestizo over other forms –called “Mestizophilia”—also led to state-backed methods of racial exclusion based on skin-colour. While methods such as ancestry markers and bioinformatic markers were used at a state level, this “pigmentocratic racism”—eugenic in nature— percolated at a more popular and imaginative level in the ways in which certain racial traits –such as blonde air, whiter skin—became more “desired” characteristics preferred during marriage.
Lemna’s presentation, on the other hand, studied the way in which Martin Heidegger’s notions of representationalism, his view and neglect of the body, his rejection of “weakness”, and his pursuit of analytic reason contributed to and were significant causes for his drift towards Nazism and its obsessions with human perfectionism, which were built upon racial and eugenic notions. These Heideggerian notions were contrasted with the ideas of Hildenbrand who advocated, instead, for affective intentionality, a need to remember the body, for “reasons of the heart”, a phenomenology of “mood”, where power was perfected in the recognition of human weakness.
The main ideas of both the presentations and their relationship to one another was succinctly summarised by Michael Wee (Oxford), who noted that while Lemna’s presentation seemed to argue to “forget not the body”, Lopez-Beltrain’s presentation argued against the dangers of “wrong ways of remembering the body”.
Finally, the event ended with a debate between Julian Savulescu (National University Singapore /Oxford) and Dr. Benjamin Hurlbut (Arizona State University) on the “moral stakes of Germline Genome Editing”. The debate saw interesting, and often generative areas of disagreement, particularly over definitions and meanings of “enhancement” and over questions of safety and responsibility. Differences of opinion also arose over questions of ethical objectivity and relativism. In particular, while one side (Savulescu) argued for certain objective, verifiable limits and definitions in discussions of enhancement and improvement, the other side (Hurlbut) argued that enhancement itself was an evaluative, regulatory and contextual category. In discussing the moral stakes of germline editing, the debate grappled with questions such as: What are the qualifiers for a better/worse life? Whose role is it to decide these categories? What are the implications and what is the place of subjectivity in discussions of freedom, choice and quality of life)?
There were also interesting differences of opinion over questions of perfectibility, risk and limitations. While Savulescu emphasized for the human quest –and even need –for curiosity, experimentation and innovation, Hurlbut emphasized the need to separate what is possible from what is permissible. These were, then, debates over human nature as well. In stating the importance of biotechnological and medical interventions and innovations, Savulescu suggested that such acts were all too human, since humans, were, by nature, curious and innovative, naturally geared towards wanting to better their lives. In contrast, Hurlbut, in pushing against the conflation of possibility and permissibility, seemed to suggest certain (perhaps human) limits against the philosophies which undergird certain biotechnological and medical innovations.
Each panel discussion was followed by short Q & A sessions with the audience, and it was heartening to see questions from both experienced scholars in the many allied fields, as well as, more importantly, from students and early career researchers (ECRs) from different disciplines, including history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. These latter set of exchanges, to me, were one of the main successes of the event, in that, by virtue of its generous range, the conference brought to the fore perspectives which allowed newer scholars and students to consider the possibility of exploring newer interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary perspectives. To this effect, the conference, in bringing historical perspectives in conversation with contemporary ethical debates, also cultivated an atmosphere of collaboration between scholars of different disciplines. As a historian of science, medicine and technology, such an endeavour which allowed for the pushing of and against certain disciplinary boundaries was personally quite significant, since our subject is, in many ways, located at the intersection of apparently disconnected fields.
In concluding, William Hurlbut reflected on the range of discussions that took place during the conference, reflecting, also, on the place of religion, philosophy and spirituality in discussions of biotechnology today. He argued that while biotechnical mechanisms of human enhancement aim at prolonging life from a physical and medical perspective, there was also a dire and pressing need to rethink the philosophical imperatives which drive these innovations—the dream of human perfection, the desire for potential immortality, or even the dream of human life without limits. He also urged the audience to consider the place of human vulnerability in the face of these dreams of perfection, a limitation on the physical boundary of life which makes us consider the measure of a life not only by its physical dimensions, but also by the affective. In doing so, the conclusion—and indeed the proceedings of the event in general— also reminded us of the forms of those enduring boundaries that are all at once old as well as immediate, historical as well as contemporary, ancient as well as abiding—the inevitability of death, the omnipresence of suffering and disease, but also the persistence of hope and love— this bounding which makes all the lives we live, subjects of such tender dignity.
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