In the essay Da ciência e do medo, arranged in his Do pensamento no deserto, Luiz Felipe Pondé makes an interesting reflection about what we can call the “genomic problem”.
He says that once, “walking through the campus of one of the largest and richest universities in the so-called first world,” he talked about genomics and the risks of genetic engineering with a group of technicians in genetics and molecular biology. Here is what happened:
One of the techniques stated that she did not understand the paraphernalia that philosophy and ethics invented about science in general, more specifically criticizing the blah blah blah about the possible social developments of the concrete and daily activity of the genomic laboratory.
So Pondé proceeds in the essay as if he were responding to the esteemed proletarian of science, undermining all the impacts that a robust genomic industry would bring in ethical, social and moral terms. It is a scary scenario.
We are talking about genetic engineering, artificial insemination, gestation through artificial wombs, —who knows? — incubators and everything that cannot be imagined of the evolution of this gait applied on large-scale.
Pondé shows us how inevitable the process is and how it will attack the human being in its most intimate dimension, destroying inwardly important meaning-forming fulcrums, all driven by an unstoppable desire for emancipation. With morality buried by the gains of the technique, there will finally be the vacuum, exposed and inconsolable.
But what to do? How to avoid disaster? There is nothing to do. Science will serve as a support to the process, depending on its many wonders.
Here is how Pondé ingeniously presumes the advancement of the genomic industry:
The trend, as in the case of our genomic social agent, will be bureaucratic mediation operated by competent institutions. On the psychopragmatic and sociopragmatic level, what will be at stake is the continuity of the emancipatory process —and here we should take into account more seriously the advertising pragmatics: “Give your child the best of you!”, or “Are you not worrying about the future of your family?” “Social security is the keyword.” A tendency to social reorganization on a bionomic basis is irreversible. (…) A broad front of normalization will be put into practice: normalization of security insurance (inclusion of genomic goods in health insurance policies), legal normalization (definition of genomic rights), pedagogical normalization (definition of the pedagogical goal as the production of individuals horizontally psycho-bio-socio-happy), psychological normalization (definition of integrated personality as the right to guiltless biohappiness), social normalization (combating the privatization of genomic goods), political normalization (campaign against biofundamentalist prejudices — platonic root naturalistic dogmatism at the service of fear and guilt — and against genism, understood as discrimination based on the lower genomic capital of individuals excluded from preventive practice).
We are left, as always, with the resignation and the cynical smile to stamp on our faces…
____________
Read more: