Nature, Progress and Stephen Jay Gould’s Biopolitics

Abstract

Genetic manipulation promises to introduce biological novelties to the ecosphere, the dinner plate, and the schoolroom. Is there an appropriate Left response to such eventualities? From its earliest roots in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the Left has generally been favorably disposed to technology, which has been seen as having the potential to liberate workers from drudgery and foster progressive changes in social relations. There is also a countervailing (though not necessarily antagonistic) Left tradition, beginning with Luddism and allied movements, of skepticism about promises held out by technological change, cognizant of the capacity of new technology to increase the power of hegemonic social groups over those less empowered. Additionally, the environmental and antinuclear and biological weapons movements of the twentieth century have contributed to Left theory the notion that there are consequences of technological activity that supersede class considerations. Global warming, nuclear winter, and pandemic infectious disease have the potential of doing away with us all, proletarian and bourgeois alike. Now that, in the twenty-first century, we have technologies with the possibility of altering not just social relations and the physical environment and ecosphere, but organismal identities themselves, a whole new set of questions has been raised about their hazards and their political and even cultural implications. Like the earlier issues raised by environmental depredation and weapons proliferation, attitudes toward genetic engineering turn out to involve commitments beyond the standard Left/Right divide. In particular, where one stands on these questions depends on one’s view of the relation of genes to biological traits, of the processes by which biological novelties have been generated in the past by human and nonhuman agency, of the privileged position (if any) occupied by the world as it exists outside human activity (“nature”), and of the relation of the natural to the artifactual. More specifically, it hinges on how one conceives of the process of organic evolution, the scientific field to which Stephen Jay Gould, a self-identified person of the Left, devoted himself and for which, during most of his life, he was the outstanding public representative. An international social movement tied to resistance to economic globalization has emerged in opposition to genetic engineering of crops, animals, and humans. Much