Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk

Ulrich Beck, Amos Weisz

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745613772
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Ecological Politics in and Age of Risk by Ulrich Beck is an original analysis of ecological politics as one part of a renewed engagement with the domain of sub-politics.

PART I

Dead Ends

1

Barbarism Modernized: The Eugenic Age

We are at the dawn of another golden age, this time perhaps tinged with green. Since the late 1950s modern biology has solved the mysteries of the cell nucleus. That heralds ‘the eighth day of creation’, as the euphoric scientists claim (and they must know about these things), and that is why the band has struck up Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It is still unclear how things will look on the ninth day or the tenth. Once again there is nothing here that is new, unprecedented or undesirable. On this topic I examine first some prospects for the foreseeable future; next, the inequality of burdens of proof in the field of decision-making; then the question of the social consequences; and lastly that of the ‘modernization of eugenics’ resulting from human genetics.

The technology of creation: humans and nature off the drawing board?

At the top of the list of biology’s promises is the liberation of humanity from the nightmares that haunt us. Our agriculture is being rearmed for the battle against famine, particularly in the Third World. The plan is to let the wine lakes, milk lakes and meat mountains grow large enough somehow to benefit (there is a slight problem here, but surely it can be solved?) the poorhouses of the world.

Miracle plants are to bring this about. They stand the folk wisdom of the old biology on its head. Their yields are enhanced and their growth cycles are shortened, because (or although) they thrive in arid regions and on saline soil, are self-fertilizing, and draw the nitrogen they need directly from the air while automatically filtering out other harmful substances. They constitute a kind of objective test of conscience, for they are poisonous to vermin, but extremely nutritious for humans.

Animals are transformed into gigantic meat factories, provisionally still on four legs. The giant pig, infused with a few human growth hormones, is already alive and kicking on the drawing board. Thus the sausage we consume will be the first step to emancipation from the taboo against cannibalism, under which mankind has laboured for millennia.

The environmental problems that still threaten us on all fronts will see the advance of genetically manipulated microbes, able literally to gobble up harmful and toxic substances of all kinds, and will raise the white flag. One can only say how fortunate it is that we are so well provided with diverse poisons; otherwise we would not know what to do with the microbes that spring fully armed from the brains of genetic engineers.

Was environmental contamination and its discovery merely the anticipatory marketing ploy of an advertising agency with the coming biotechnological paradise on its books? Or are the slightly too assured declarations of victory only intended to drown out the background noise of terror, gripping even promoters and investors in spite of their rage to construct and their investments of millions, so that the choruses of approval also represent a way of keeping one’s spirits up – by whistling in the dark forests of uncertainty?

On one side, the application of knowledge gleaned from animal genetics to human beings is coming up against ethical and legal barriers. In Germany as elsewhere, human cloning and the creation of man-beast hybrids are criminal offences. On the other side stand the worldwide pioneers of human-genetic reproduction engineering: agronomists, veterinary specialists and physiologists. Jacques Testart, feted as the ‘father’ of the first French test-tube baby, has become an outspoken critic of this development. He records: ‘The Englishman, Robert Edwards, was previously working on mice, and the Australian, Alan Trouson, worked on sheep and cows; I worked on cows and pigs. We developed these techniques and the doctors then turned to us, because they wanted to profit from what we had achieved with cows and other animals.’ Testart sees a coercive chain emerging.

If ovulation is stimulated by means of hormones, a large number of eggs will be produced simultaneously. If the natural cycle is replaced in this way by an artificial one, freezing techniques must be developed for the embryo. Egg donations thus become feasible: women donate their eggs to other women. From my experience with cows I know what will come next: determining the sex of the embryo. With cows that is an economic consideration. But I can imagine couples asking me for a boy or a girl. The more people profit from my researches, the more this development worries me. (1988, pp. 65ff)

The grey area between animal and ‘human’ experiments is correspondingly large (Wollschläger 1987). For the fertilized, fissiparous cell group that will grow into a little person, subject to the permission of adults and the will of nature, is not legally a person or a thing. Theoretically speaking, an embryo is nobody’s property. There is a joke at certain clinics, and perhaps it is not all that unrealistic: an embryo whose parents met only in the test-tube belongs to the doctor.

Take the German case as a typical example. Leading scientists consider research into living embryos, within fourteen days of the fusion of egg and sperm, justifiable. This position is supported by the German Research Council. Yet the public was able to learn that, according to expert estimates, ‘at least 200 experiments on live human embryos at an early stage of development were required to create the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown’, and that ‘for three or four years now, eight- to twelve-day-old embryos have been tested to destruction.’ ‘Utility embryos’ is the unintentionally harsh official coinage for these beings, upon whom research is allowed to deploy its techniques.

Such experiments are defensible, an expert committee argued, provided that ‘they aid the detection, prevention or correction of disease in the relevant embryo, or enable the acquisition of well-defined, high-grade medical knowledge’ – in other words, always.¹

A central committee on ethics together with some regional committees, set up by the German Medical Association, is supposed to decide on appropriate research proposals. In reply to a question, an executive member of this committee on ethics said that permission was granted, in one case brought in 1986, for the egg cells of hamsters to be brought into contact with human semen. The emergence of a human-hamster hybrid was ruled out as impossible. The official moral philosopher added, clearly without realizing what he was saying: ‘Many similar experiments carried out worldwide have confirmed this’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10 November 1987).

Admittedly, the application to the human genetic code of what has already been practised on microbes is still a gleam in the eye of researchers. Yet the prenatal genetic test marks the first step towards human genetic engineering. Molecular biologists can diagnose hereditary diseases such as muscoviscidosis, haemophilia, Huntingdon’s syndrome (St Vitus’ dance) and muscular atrophy, and ‘prevent’ them in combination with legalized abortion. It goes without saying that doctors are able to determine today whether a foetus is male or female, and whether it displays any chromosome anomalies or hereditary diseases. Soon, it is hoped, predispositions to schizophrenia or even criminality will be testable. So far ‘only’ the ‘tentative pregnancy’ (Rothman 1986) has been slipped past the German parliament and into law in this way. That means that the parents are not only entitled but obliged to decide whether they want to allow the child to be born if, from the point of view of genetic engineering, it is ‘flawed’ in this or that respect. Children are thus no longer simply conceived and born, but diagnosed for their qualities before birth, and perhaps eliminated. Parenthood is extended by genetic (i.e. ‘divine technological’) means, and supplemented by a bioconstructional element – initially by negative selection combined with legalized abortion.

As Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim has observed, ‘Like any other technology, [reproductive medicine creates] its own market.’ A typical pattern is beginning to emerge: new biomedical aids are first introduced in order to stop or relieve suffering for a closely defined range of undisputed ‘problems’. Then the phase of transition and habituation sets in, during which the field of application is continually extended. The end is foreseeable: all men and women are defined as potential clients – no longer, of course, to prevent direct damage to health, but because of the ‘greater effectiveness’ of technological intervention over nature’s whims, incalculability and susceptibility to interference.

Thus the circumstances where in-vitro fertilization is indicated have multiplied within a few years, and are now so blurred as to be virtually unlimited. In-vitro fertilization with subsequent evaluation of the embryo has already been presented as the ideal method of the future to prevent severe disabilities at birth – or, more precisely, to prevent severely disabled children from being born. The use of inferior human sperm also becomes problematic. Only one man in ten would pass the quality controls applied in beef production (and bulls with inferior sperm are sent to the abattoir). In-vitro fertilization and embryo refrigeration are already being proposed as methods for timetabling the intervals between births. Increasing numbers of men are depositing their sperm at the sperm bank before having a vasectomy, ‘just in case’. Married couples are already asking for another man to provide sperm, as they are dissatisfied with the appearance or personality of the husband. Similarly wives have asked for the eggs of other women, because they were not satisfied with themselves in one way or another. Reproduction technologies in general are being lauded as the royal road to family planning: ‘Parents may soon be in a position to carry out total family planning, from control of family size to the sexes of the children and the sequence of males and females’ (Beck-Gernsheim 1987b, pp. 287ff).

Prenatal diagnostics transforms the process of being born into an embryonic obstacle race. Every ‘advance’ increases the number of obstacles. This involves the intervention not only of parental choice at the previously untouched natural foundations of human life, but also that of social selection and thus of principles, ends, interests and prejudices. All of this takes place in a realm before the beginning of human existence, in the twilight of becoming where the limits of the medical definition of human life are constantly redrawn.

This development is still in the diagnostic stage. Yet some of our genetic do-gooders have intimations of higher things. One imagines that the ‘gene repair shop’ will soon be open for business: surgery will be carried out on the chromosome nucleus in order to replace ‘diseased’ genes by ‘healthy’ ones. As yet, the intention is corrective rather than creative. But that (potentially) leads down the slippery slope to changing a given DNA pattern by the addition, subtraction and permutation of elements. In this way the genetic text is, as it were, rewritten. This is in principle possible by means of a complete reading (or even an incomplete one) in conjunction with appropriate microtechniques. In the final analysis, it is a kind of genetic architecture (Hohlfeld 1988). This leads to new types, artful variations and whole new species of living beings. As said above, these techniques are already being applied with success to microbes, and we have them to thank for the ‘green revolution’ that is now inescapable. It is true that there are taboos that bar their application to humans. However, their scope will be greater than that, for instance, of all the family laws that parliaments have debated and voted on for decades. But there is a large grey area, and the boundaries will be defined by medicine.

Giving progress the benefit of the doubt: the inequality of the burdens of proof

Does not the subjection of human nature to human and social ends open up unimagined possibilities of self-creation for mankind and society? Have the biologists not given us the keys to a genetic reform of humanity that will make all previous political reforms and revolutions look like desultory scratching on the surface? Are we not in transition from stone-age politics to the genetic-preventive biopolicies of the future, policies which will further social ends through a change, as yet unimagined, of our central biological rather than our social structures?

An examination of the present state of research, with its protestations of innocence in these matters, will not convince many. It all adds up to an inequality: one side may continue its researches, no matter how far beyond the pale, while the other may not even ask any further questions. And is not the crucial point, this time at least, that questions should make clear the possibilities before these become actualities and thereby render questioning pointless?

The matter is substantially decided in advance by the choice of questions discussed. Those who consider the social consequences of human genetic engineering to be unknowable until they have actually occurred have to wait before they can act, or even think about it, and are thus obliged to acquiesce. Anyone who concentrates on the details of possible repercussions in isolated areas of policy entirely loses sight of the larger issue of the cultural consequences: ‘Life, hitherto surrounded at least by traces of an almost religious aura of inviolability, becomes as technologically manipulable as plastic. Is that appropriate?’ (van den Daele 1987, p. 42).

Whereas questions of detail can be solved at least in outline by the usual methods of specialist science, this gigantic question forces one to reflect upon culture and juggle with foundations and assumptions, and in turn perhaps diminishes the political relevance of recommendations. But even if one decides in favour of a microanalysis of the consequences, one has already answered the long-term questions, without having raised them, ‘implicitly in terms of the currently established valuations’ (van den Daele 1987, p. 42).

What is now fermenting in the genetic research laboratories is undoubtedly putting the ‘essence’ of humans, their very humanity, within the scope of social purposes and structural principles. ‘It would be a metaphysical break with the normative “essence” of humankind, and, considering the complete unpredictability of the consequences, the most foolhardy game of chance – a blind and presumptuous demiurge hacking about at the heart of creation’ (Jonas 1985, p. 197). Yet will the commitment to ‘technological abstinence’, however well founded ethically, be able to halt curiosity, ambition and the eventual deproblematization of research and medico-economic interests? Is one not permitted, indeed obliged, at least to know what one is up against – in other words, to cross the boundary before saying a qualified yes or no?

In the debate that has unfolded and will surely ignite over the next few years, uncertainty and ignorance about the consequences prevail on every side. However, while all the parties flail about blindly in the mists of the future, the burdens of proof and the opportunities for action are extremely unequally distributed. The geneticists and physicians can pursue a policy of the fait accompli, and are always well beyond whatever is still referred to, in public and by commissions of inquiry, as the very latest development. Furthermore, they are partisan – for genetic engineering must tailor its researches to the requirements of subsequent applications. Freedom to carry out research presupposes the freedom to apply it. At the very least, that means the unhindered idolization of research technique and development. Here, for the sake of pure curiosity, assent must be elicited for the application of research – not only before one knows what is being done and what the repercussions are, but as a precondition for posing the question in the first place. Hence the compulsive optimism, the preliminary skirmish on the subject of embryo research, and the many crude safeguards intended to secure the freedom to apply the results of research. Necessity is the mother of all these misbegotten measures, the need to minimize the consequences, suppress them, and make them invisible. It is the precondition for the very possibility of research. I say this in order to encourage a receptive mood for the strategic naivety on offer here.

The argument runs as follows: first, we will solve the central problems of humankind (famine, environmental despoliation, scarcity of energy resources, inherited diseases, Aids) by unprecedented means; second, these are really traditional methods, no different in principle from those of cheese manufacture through the centuries; third, nothing can go wrong anyway because we all have the very best intentions. All talk of monsters or eugenics is ludicrous and only stirs up the irrational fears of the populace.

Now this is a catalogue of fairly wild claims. Yet suppose we accept the promises at face value. Let us leave aside the fact that they are just as unexamined as the critics’ fears. Let us forget that they derive from the poverty of an argument that says ‘application’ where it means ‘research’. One might as well justify the construction of nuclear reactors by talking about the manufacture of pliers, or sanction capitalism by pointing to the commerce of the ancient Greeks.

It may well be difficult to locate the dividing line between such things as artificial limbs, false teeth, pacemakers, kidney transplants and genetic engineering; or between in-vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnosis and the recombination through genetic engineering of unrelated genera at the molecular level. (Not least because the disjunction is perhaps not discernible in the laboratory, but only at the level of social consequences; the latter, however, are circumspectly left unaddressed.) It is also the case that this perspective distracts one from the decisive question of what reality the test-tube holds in store. The future is wrapped up in the past in order to be brought – in the wrapping paper of the apparently familiar – unseen and unlegitimated, over the thresholds of public sensitivity. The Customs call that sort of thing smuggling. We all smuggle now and again. But to smuggle the genetic age beyond the limits of the supportable – in this late scientific era, such an exploit would be more than worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

One may well take seriously this recourse to a display of ‘good intentions’ and the ‘free will’ of all the parties involved – and therefore one need not take it seriously at all. The road to hell, as is well known, is paved with good intentions: the ‘good intentions’ of the players are not enough to legitimate a technological chasm opening onto a veritable kingdom of creation and commercial transformation. This idealism is really not acceptable after 200 years of industrialism. It is equivalent to the conviction, positively wicked in its naivety, that the course of technological development and of its social ramifications was determined by the intentions of the founding fathers of science or by the voluntary involvement of its clients. In fact these proclamations are in blatant contradiction to the manifest autonomization of development, which can be gauged from such parameters as investment levels, international research competition, current and planned systems of research cooperation, the pre-emptive development of markets, etc. Under these conditions, public attention to the question whether...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Translator’s Note
• Preface
• Introduction: The Immortality of Industrial Society and the Contents of this Book
• Part I: Dead Ends
• Part II: Antidotes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index