NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #110     A Publication of The Nature Institute       August 31, 2000
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          Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
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Death and the Single Cause (Stephen L. Talbott)
   Must we find dead bodies to fight environmental abuse?

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Technology Is Useful (John Wilson)

About this newsletter


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                        DEATH AND THE SINGLE CAUSE

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

I don't know how to say what I'm going to say without it being grotesquely
misinterpreted.  But let me begin by offering two truths I think we need
to hold together:

   "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for
   his friends".

   Today we must expect that some of the greatest abuses of man and nature
   will be justified in the name of saving lives.

The following meditation, very much a work in progress, was prompted by a
couple of things:  first, continuing news about the West Nile virus in New
York City and surroundings, where public fear (and consequent wholesale
spraying of insecticides aimed at mosquitoes) has not always been
proportional to the danger; and, second, the widespread justification of
even the most questionable biotech procedures whenever a life is at risk.
For example, one recent commentator opposes human germline experimentation
as hazardous, ill-advised, and unethical, yet suggests that the risks and
wrongs "may be counterbalanced when a life is at stake".

In the West Nile case, you've got fearful citizens on the one side,
worried that they or a loved one will be bitten by a mosquito and die.  On
the other side, environmentalists fret about the accumulative results of
the thousands of novel poisons we are releasing into the environment at an
accelerating rate.  In any debate framed by these two fears, the
environmentalists are almost certain to lose, because a single death
attributable to a single, identifiable agent carries vastly more weight
with the public than debatable statistics about theoretically increased
mortality due to unspecifiable combinations of unseen chemicals at barely
detectable concentrations in the air, water, and soil.  As Peter Montague
put the problem in a recent issue of Rachel's Environment and Health
Weekly:

   The truth is, scientists can never figure out whether pesticides on a
   child's cornflakes (for example) are "safe" or "insignificant" because
   (a) there are dozens or hundreds of adverse effects to consider, and --
   if history is any guide -- new ones will be discovered tomorrow; (b)
   the pesticide effects will be added on top of whatever other stresses
   the child may be experiencing (medical drugs, auto exhaust, paint
   fumes, second-hand cigarette smoke, divorced parents, chronic ailments,
   excessive ultraviolet radiation from the sun because of a depleted
   ozone layer, and so on); (c) children (like all organisms) have
   differing abilities to cope, and a unique history of exposure to
   hazards; and (d) all organisms, like all ecosystems, are simply too
   complex for science to understand sufficiently to allow reliable
   prediction of effects.

All this notwithstanding, we love precise causes for our problems -- they
seem the scientific thing to have.  That's why the environmental movement
tries, wherever possible, to tie down a death to a particular pollutant.
And, for PR purposes, the tying down is almost as good as having a
malevolent mosquito for an enemy; you can trigger fear and mobilize the
public.  But my suspicion is that an overly zealous crying of "death!" and
an overly confident fingering of its supposedly definitive causes will
bring us more trouble than gain.

Quite apart from the near-certainty that, with further investigation, our
alleged causes will tend to deflate under the weight of multiplying
caveats, there's also this:  When we make the avoidance of death and the
eradication of its "cause" an absolute imperative, we provide a handy
rationale for whatever remedy may present itself, however extreme
and destructive.  In the end, those who would commit atrocities will
benefit from absolute, unbending imperatives far more than those who seek
true healing.  Healing is always primarily a matter of restoring balances,
not destroying enemy causes.


Is Death a Consequence or a Cause?
----------------------------------

When an octagenarian gets the flu and dies in his sleep, did the flu
"cause" his death?  Perhaps you could say so in a shallow and partial
sense.  But it's worth remembering that death comes to all of us in the
normal course of events.  The man may have been ready to die simply
because that's the natural conclusion his entire organism had reached, and
his susceptibility to the flu may have merely testified to this fact.  It
may be truer to say that his death "caused" the flu than that the flu
"caused" his death.

I am currently sharing in the care for an 83-year-old woman who lives in
my home and is suffering Alzheimer's-like dementia.  Despite my own acute
failings as a caregiver, and despite my wife's and my uncertainty about
whether we can manage this responsibility, I do feel that, so long as it
is entrusted to us, her care is a sacred charge.  True, this woman is
mostly "not here".  But the same is true of a small child, and in both
cases it is by ministering to what is here that we reach what has not yet
arrived or has already departed.

You may or may not find meaning in this particular conviction; I mention
it only in order to make clear that I do not think a life is meaningless
or wasted simply because its earthly manifestation is severely
constrained.  This, I hope, will prevent misinterpretation of the
following question:

When, about two years ago -- and after showing the first signs of mental
deterioration -- this same woman suffered a near-fatal case of spinal
meningitis, only to be brought back from the edge by antibiotics, was this
a worthy or unworthy defeat of death?  Was she ready for death when
the meningitis came, so that this current phase of her life in our home
was not really "intended"?

I don't know.  But my fear of misinterpretation is all the greater because
I realize how eagerly the question -- and one particular answer to it --
will be embraced by the supporters of euthanasia.  Be assured:  I will be
much happier than I ever ought to be if Jack Kevorkian spends the rest of
his life stewing in jail.  But I also believe that if good and evil are
opposites, they are deeply entangled opposites, so that a virtuous stance
can easily look like a diabolical one, and vice versa.  The difference
between a Nazi experimenter on human flesh and the most saintly surgeon
may, at certain moments and in outward, logical terms, seem to require
splitting the finest of hairs.


Endings Are As Important As Beginnings
--------------------------------------

Those "outward, logical terms" are a good part of the problem.  By
inclining us toward the search for sharp-edged, univocal causes and
effects, they blind us to the subtle qualities of the larger picture.
After all, when we look at life as a whole -- when we look qualitatively,
rather than with the binary gaze that says a person is either dead or not,
and the former state should be avoided at all costs -- we discover that
life and death belong together.  Our living and our dying require each
other.

Our dying begins at an early age, and at a certain mid-point of life one
begins to realize that the whole positive meaning of his existence lies in
the effort to do that dying well.  Personally, fear-ridden as I am, I
expect to deal with the ultimate event very badly indeed.  But I can
testify to the liberating effect -- the enrichment of life -- that
comes from even the barest hint of a reconciliation with death.  To
make an absolute of life and to view death as something to be avoided at
all costs is to deprive life of its savor and meaning, and to guarantee
that it is lived badly.  We have to die a bit every day in order to live
well.

Look at it this way.  If the statement about laying down one's life for a
friend suggests that an earthly life is worth saving at an extreme cost,
it also suggests that letting go of a life can be a supreme achievement.
Without treasuring both sides of this truth, we will lose even the sense
that life is valuable, since there is value only in what can be given
away.

What is required of us, I think, is to begin learning to read our lives
organically, integrally, with a sense for their direction, form, and
meaning.  Then we will recognize that endings are as natural and important
as beginnings.  And then, when we read about several deaths "caused" by
the normally mild West Nile virus, we will be deeply concerned and moved
to action, but our action will be tempered by a certain perspective, so
that we will not easily be stampeded in panic.

If I have read the news reports correctly, the West Nile virus is not much
more likely to bring death than the flu, and, like the flu, it primarily
threatens the elderly.  When we do hear of a death, it seems to me that we
should require the truth of the epidemiologist and coroner to confront the
truth of the eulogist, until we have one harmonious story.  Perhaps our
first question ought to be a respectful one about the life that has
passed.  Who was this?  What was the shape and gesture of his life?  And
how did his passing round off that shape -- or leave it incomplete?
Without such understanding, how can we possibly know whether the passing
occasioned the illness or the illness the passing?

No, I don't think there are many people on earth today with the wisdom to
make such judgments -- the wisdom to judge, for example, whether a
deceased child's destiny was fulfilled or an octagenarian's cut tragically
short.  I myself most certainly lack the necessary insight, and all
prospects for it seem distressingly remote.

Nor could we conceivably enshrine this line of thought in public policy.
But then, while much of what is highest in the human being must be
excluded from public policy in any direct sense, it remains true that
wise public policy depends upon our pursuing the highest things.  And it
is hardly quixotic to suggest we must strive toward the kind of insight I
have characterized here, given that we are already forced to make these
fateful judgments all the time, as when we must decide whether to inject
an 81-year-old meningitis sufferer with antibiotics.  We might as well
work at learning to make them well.


No Call to Tolerate Pollutants
------------------------------

It is the same with our efforts creatively to sustain the biosphere.  How
can we heal a natural setting when the ecological complexities are so far
beyond our understanding?  Yet we have no choice but to act and learn as
best we can, since our current presence is damaging the biosphere
irremediably.

Here, as in the consideration of our own lives, we need a growing capacity
to grasp the expressive qualities of organic wholes.  Only when we
recognize the higher-level unity manifesting itself through all the parts
and determining those parts can we make sense of the overwhelming
complexity.

Such an approach will lead us, I am convinced, to be rather less inclined
toward the search for dead bodies and smoking guns when it comes to
environmental pollutants.  Certainly illnesses and deaths will always be a
major cause for concern and a clue for further research, but they should
not be absolutized as unqualified evils or as simplistic pointers to
culprit causes.  In assessing an organic setting, we always have to do
with the interpenetrating qualities of a picture, not a one-dimensional
sequence of causes and effects.

Unfortunately, all of this will sound to many like a call for greater
tolerance of environmentally destructive pollutants, as long as they are
kept in some sort of balance.  As you will see in a moment, this is not
quite the case.  But first we need to acknowledge that it does
appear distressingly inconsistent to be tolerant of death when it comes to
mosquitoes, and absolutist about avoiding death when it comes to
environmental pollutants.  The solution, I think, is to be ecologically
minded in both cases.

It is wholly consistent with what I said above about personal acceptance
of death to say also:  As long as we are at risk of a single death from
mosquito-borne West Nile virus, we are bound to work against the disease.
But we must work with the ecological balances of nature rather than
against them, simply because that is the only way to work without
defeating ourselves in unforeseen ways.

It is within this ecological context that a certain acceptance of death
is forced upon us even as a matter of public policy (where we must accept
limits to what we can reasonably do while always working to push those
limits outward).  But the same concern for essential ecological balances
that leads to a (provisional) acceptance of a certain mortality rate
associated with mosquitoes will also prevent us from countenancing
the unhealthy disruption of the biosphere by pollutants.  To refuse
to absolutize death -- to recognize its essential place in life -- is not
to condone any activity we can recognize as unhealthy or destructive.
A sensitivity to the essential presence of death in our lives should make
us more alert to what kills gratuitously, not less.  Ecological realities
may place limits upon the control of mosquitoes, but no ecological
reality requires dumping many of the damaging chemicals we unload into
our environment.

In other words, the flipside of everything I said above is that we should
not feel obligated to find dead bodies and smoking guns before we take
action against abuses of the environment.  In many cases we will learn to
recognize that this or that substance just doesn't belong in our
fields or forests or oceans; it is a jarring and contradictory element in
the picture, regardless of whether we can link particular disasters to it.
The besmirching of the beauty and integrity of nature will itself be an
outrage to us, because it will show Death escaping its proper bounds.

I am not suggesting it will be easy for us to become worthy sculptors of
our own lives, from beginning to end, or of nature's wholeness, from
growth to decay.  It seems nearly impossible.  But there is no escaping
the demand upon us.  Humility in the face of the demand is probably the
first virtue, and a devotion to Nature as our teacher the second.  And the
third, perhaps, is a willingness to loosen our rigid, unbalancing grip
upon transient life.

As to the engineers' decidedly unhumble depredations upon the genome, to
which I alluded at the outset:  I doubt that any proper limits can be
recognized or defended until we find it within ourselves to say, "My
deliverance from this disease -- my life itself -- is not that important".



Technology and Death
--------------------

When I remarked above that death requires an acceptance on our part even
as we are bound to work against it, some of you may have been reminded of
a theme I have pursued in the past:

   The computer is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy; as our
   friend it will destroy us.

More generally:  technology is a kind of death principle in human society
today.  We must often embrace it and use it, but can safely do so only
while working against it.  We must continually become more alive and awake
as human beings in order to preserve our humanity in the presence of the
machine's powerful inducement toward sleepwalking and automatism, which is
death.

Unfortunately, the flexibility required for this creative adaptation --
the ability to move in apparently contrary directions and to make a higher
unity of them -- is exactly what our experience with machines (and
especially with intelligent machines) tends to discourage.  It may be
trite, but it is also true, to say that machines train us in rigidly
logical thinking much more than in expressive, artistic thinking.  The
dancer or composer or painter can take opposite movements and harmonize
them in a way that the logician must not.

But if the machine drags us downward and nothing much at all pulls us
upward ... well, that is the whole point.  This asymmetry is exactly what
we need, however grave the risk of a disastrous outcome.  For we can
become more alive and wakeful only from within ourselves.  A noble choice
"pulled" out of us would not be a noble choice, and would not be
our choice.

A society driven by a kind of death-like technological necessity, but with
nothing "commanding" us to counter this necessity, is what allows us to
waken more fully as selves.  After all, what makes a self is the ability
to act out of oneself rather than out of an external and mechanical
necessity.

Our relationship with the environment, with death, and with technology
needs to be much more like a dance than a mechanism, much more the
expressive pursuit of a guiding image than the assertion of causes and
effects.  This is the way every organism moves in an ecological context,
its own gestures both reflecting and responding to everything else that is
going on -- but in a way that expresses its own unique being.  Only with
such grace can we accept death (or technology) and in that very act
transcend it.

Related article:

** "The Distorting Potentials of Technical Capability" in NF #95.


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                              CORRESPONDENCE


Technology Is Useful
--------------------

Response to:  "Of Vision Quests, Gender, and Boredom" (NF-109)
From:  John Wilson (JWilson@OIR.Arizona.Edu)

In your comment and list of reasons for "the public's infatuation with
digital technologies," you missed two key points:

First, the Borsook example is about "people working in high tech...  grunt
programmers". They are doing what they do because it is the job, not
because of infatuation. So the Borsook is irrelevant to questions about
the public.

Second, you omitted the most obvious reason: People find high tech useful.

I first bought a CPM machine when I had my own business and needed help I
could afford (less than a secretary), to prepare mailings, letters and
proposals. (At university student computer labs, word processing is still
the most common use for computers.) Then I discovered the wonders of
Visicalc and budgets and comparisons, and then next year's budgets and
comparisons, became so much easier.

Today my guess is that the number one motivation is still the ability to
do something faster (word processing) or more reliably and consistently
(spreadsheets) or something you can't do at all any other way (email with
flexible address lists).

For other types of technology, CAT scans are to see inside in ways that x-
rays can't, e.g., less harmfully. Digital thermometers are less breakable
and don't include mercury. My digital watch is far more reliable than a
mechanical one that I could get for the same Sears price.

My daily reality, partly because I have a Mac rather than a PC so don't
have to do as much grunt programming, is that my favorite digital
technologies keep track of my book and movie lists, help with taxes,
conduct an amount of business that I would find impossible with phones,
and look things up. I don't think of myself as infatuated but I would sure
miss it, like my garage door opener, if I didn't have it.

John

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                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #110 :: August 31, 2000

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