The great irony of the attempt of modern hubris to control human life for its own good by scientific means will be that as these means grow more powerful and invasive, so will the inability to define the human good toward which its Promethean wisdom strives. Those who doubt it should meditate on the increasingly fractured universe of discourse in our age on what is good, true, and beautiful.
Recently I was sent an article whose writer identified the willingness to allow a Down Syndrome child to come to term, to be born and nurtured, as an ugly fundamentalist perversion, a fanatic’s badge of self-righteousness worn at the expense of a world which must bear this lebensunwertes Leben unjustly forced upon it, not a sign of love, based in the conviction that in God’s eyes we are all like these children, and no less to be loved for it, but a sign of evil--exterminating them as much a sign of the good as keeping them is wicked. [Here is an authoritative article on the Nazi killing of “abnormal or malformed” children--by nurses who believed themselves Christians of some kind, and felt nervous about the child-murderer part of their resumes--but didn't want to lose their jobs.]
Parallel cases, pervasive and strong, can be made with regard to the true and the beautiful in the hands of those who believe these qualities are not in fact transcendental, reaching toward an Absolute beyond their expression in the world, but subject to an evolutionary principle which is itself Absolute and rests nowhere but in the minds and wills of autonomous men.
This being the case, the end of it all is perhaps more clearly seen in The Island of Doctor Moreau than Brave New World--a chaos of experiment, unguided by any uniform conception of what man is, without even an Alpha-Epsilon hierarchy based on a differential valuation of human intelligence, imposing an order (however pointless) on the world.
Moral intelligence having been killed in the beginning, practical intelligence will be the last virtue crushed in the hands of the manipulators--but it, too, will finally be destroyed. It is required for the work, but is, after all, human intelligence, and what is being done here does not have its origin or end in what is human.
This should have been known by the instruments of the un-Men from the beginning, for what they have done to accomplish their assignments has never been humane. Their unmistakable signs have always been the taking, wherever possible, of innocent life, and--note this well--the countercharge that those who try to stop them are the real killers, the true enemies of the human race. Whoever tries to end the mass killing of children may confidently expect the tu quoque of the bloody-handed, to be accused of involvement in a score of other "holocausts" its advocates have contrived to deceive the simple and exculpate themselves.
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