Is A Biotech BRAVE NEW WORLD The Next Phase Of Totalitarianism?
Peter Lawler
BigThink.com
October 18, 2011
That’s the conclusion of Flagg Taylor—one of the leading experts on totalitarian communism:
I’ve spent and continue to spend a great deal of time thinking about totalitarianism. In what guise will it appear next? What if we don’t need some dramatic revolutionary change in government, some new political ideology, but only an ever-gradual, barely noticeable change in our sense of ourselves? In other words, don’t worry so much about Orwell’s 1984 but about Huxley’sBrave New World. The great dissidents knew that they were struggling against more than a deeply unjust political order—they struggled against (in the phrase of Chantal Delsol) the “systematic destruction of man’s reality.” As Václav Havel put it, “The natural world, in virtue of its very being, bears within it the presupposition of the absolute which grounds, delimits, animates, and directs it, without which it would be unthinkable, absurd, and superfluous, and which we can only quietly respect. Any attempt to spurn it, master it, or replace it with something else, appears . . . as an expression of hubris for which humans must pay a heavy price.” Aristotle famously argued we are strange in-between beings—higher than beasts but lower than the gods. When we play God, do we not become even lower than the beasts?
Totalitarianism, from Flagg’s view, means that we’re free from natural limitations and moral restraints. So we’re free to impose our personal wills upon reality as we please. He mentions the example of the woman who took advantage of the techno-ability to abort one of her twins. It’s her preference as a consumer to have just one kid, and so she can alter freely the intention of nature to give her two.
The Rest…HERE
