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While the Sweeney jeans add is clearly an overreaction to fake eugenics downthread, it does seem like real, hard, embryo selection eugenics is here, or at least right around the corner. Scott Alexander's article released yesterday, Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection, says:
The gist of the article is that while the science is still in its infancy and there are a lot of challenges to overcome, these companies are not just selling vaporware. There's real embryo selection based on traits happening, that is going to be significant for babies being born now.
Of course this article is just another confirmation of science fiction becoming reality, but it's still shocking to see from my perspective. You'd think we would at least have a discussion as to whether this should be legal or not, but unfortunately given how crippled out legislative apparatus is, tech companies continue to just push ahead with zero fear of regulatory change. They're willing to take the risk.
Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:
While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.
The culture war lines here would've been pretty clear a while ago, but now it's muddled. Will the religious right be able to turn their coalition against this? Will the left see this as inequality on steroids? Will an uneasy alliance be made to ban this technology from the light of day? Only time will tell.
I’m genuinely curious as to what the Chinese Communist take on this will be.
On the one hand, this could very well be their golden ticket, not just out of their apparently terminal fertility/relationship-formation doom spiral, but to an entire population of superhuman Han Chinese who could utterly mog the rest of humanity in every single human endeavor—and if this race of Übermenschen is ushered in by the CCP, they will effectively have an eternal Mandate of Heaven. This has been every Chinese ruler’s wet dream since the time of Confucius, if not earlier.
On the other hand, the CCP has not looked too kindly on past attempts at human genetic engineering; see, for example, how they threw He Jiankui in prison for 3 years over his CRISPR experiments. And of course, the very idea that individuals may have innate differences that cannot be attributed to their environment is utter anathema to Marxist orthodoxy—whence Lysenkoism in the Stalin era. Now, my sense is that the (post-Mao) CCP wouldn’t force the scientific establishment to kowtow to politics the way Stalin did: they know that that way lies the ignominious end of China’s ascendancy on the global scientific stage. But at the same time, they really are true believers in Marx, Lenin, and Mao to an extent that most western commentators don’t fully appreciate.
This is a common point I see repeated about Communism, but in practice it's more promoted by liberals and Western Marxists then actual Communist regimes. Both the Soviet and Chinese education system are hugely based around finding talented students and elevating them through intense educations. The actual implementation of blank slate equity type programs and elimination of gifted tracks is an oddity of Western capitalist countries neither the Soviets or Chinese ever attempted to put anything like that into practice. And the leaders of both were willing to make statements about people groups that would make most Western leaders faint.
Your absolutely right that the Chinese and especially Xi Jinping are true believers in Marxism but it's a syncretized and Sinicized, Marxism full of Han chauvinism. Very few Chinese ascribe to blank slate ideology and I don't think the government particularly cares about promoting it or even subscribes to it themselves. I feel like trying to predict the CCP based on "Orthodox Marxism" Is like trying to predict the behavior of Evangelicals based on the Catechism Catholic Church, you might get some hits but it's not a useful way to go about it. For example the CCP is comfortable not suppressing theories about Chinese being a separate race of humans descended from a different ancestor, while these theories are not mainstream they aren't taboo either. The PRC is a national project for Chinese and nationalism and pride in China are off the charts, it's not a self hating liberal western country but neither is it a post national experiment like the Soviet Union. The CCP is out to benefit Chinese and justifies it's rule as a meritocratic rule of experts.
I agree the CCP reaction will be interesting and they may very well be hard against all this, but if they are it's not going to be against based on a slaveish adherence to blank state theories that they don't subscribe to and their entire society is organized in opposition to.
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