The World's Fair

Last week, I managed to catch one of last year's Massey lectures on the radio. These are basically a high profile lecture series that is sponsored by both the CBC and the House of Anansi Press. In essense, they usually involve a prominent Canadian cogniscenti who attempts to cover a topic pertinent in the realm of citizenship at both the Canadian and, indeed, the global level.

The 2006 series was authored by Margaret Somerville, a noted ethicist out of Montreal, and the byline of the accompanying book reads:

What does it mean to be human today, when mind-altering scientific breakthroughs are challenging our fundamental ideas of ourselves, how we relate to others and the world around us, and how we find meaning in life?

Some of the controversial topics Somerville touches upon are our growing acceptance of new reproductive technologies, and our conundrums over the genetic modification of plants and animals. She eloquently proposes that it is only through our willingness to undertake a journey of the human imagination -- by heeding our stories, myths, and moral intuition -- that we can truly see, understand, speak about, and relate to the world around us, and thereby develop an ethics to guide us.

Anyway, the lecture I heard was the third in the series, entitled "Old Nature, New Science" and essentially tried to look at the concept of the natural, in an attempt to provide a framework where ethical arguments can be explored.

The dangers of rejecting a concept of the natural - fo example, of human nature - include this: if there is no essential human nature, then no technologizing of that nature is dehumanizing. In other words, such a rejection serves to legitimate the technological project, because humans do not have a nature that must be safeguarded, but a history that can be rewritten for the future through technological interventions. It is a powerful endorsement of the technological imperative: have technology; must use. Another dangerof rejecting a concept of the natural is that we lose the distinction between using technology "to repair nature when it fails" and using it to realize what would be an impossible outcome through natural processes, a distinction that can help us to differentiate between ethical and unethical uses of technology. Repairing nature is, as a rule, less ethically troublesome than is doing the naturally impossible. (p97)

Overall, it was an intriguing lecture to listen to, especially as it partially focused on the realm of human reproduction, but it did make me question what exactly the definition of "natural" is, particularily when one looks it from the human consumption point of view. I wonder if we can apply the same rubric to questions of day to day consumerism?

Anyway, one of the lectures (the first) is available for listening at the CBC site. While she doesn't have the orator delivery of someone like Stephen Lewis, it's still worth checking out here.