Stop eugenics

Every month, youtuber Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a phenomenon typical of our time. This month, he criticizes a contemporary form of eugenics.

Le Courrier international published an article on October 11 entitled «In Silicon Valley's “super-baby” factory». It talked about Noor Siddiqui, founder of an «embryo screening» start-up, whose aim is «[t]o provide parents with an unprecedented amount of information about their future offspring, enabling them to start a family in good health and with complete peace of mind».

This will enable us to predict an embryo's risk of contracting pathologies «such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity or schizophrenia». Charming program, but no thanks.

What is at work in this form of eugenics is the scientific and techno-enthusiastic vision of the world, which feeds on the limits it exceeds. Exceeding the limits is a kind of game in which we take pride in defying nature.

There's something perverse about this quest for control and growing intolerance of uncertainty. What these people fail to see is that what they seek to «optimize» loses its meaning as they optimize it, so that they infallibly ruin what they clumsily intend to create the «optimal» conditions for.

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How can you authentically love a being whom you have condemned even before his birth to be not your offspring, but your own? product?

Such a child, «optimized» at source, is likely to feel that, when he reaches the age of reason, he has been shaped more than loved. French philosopher and mathematician Olivier Rey sees another risk: «The more a child is controlled before birth, the less controllable it will be afterwards - if only by mirroring back to its creators the freedom of choice they used to have it.»

Has anyone thought about the unrest that such tinkering is bound to create?

This is the history of technology: solving problems by creating new ones, and with these, inducing new modes of adaptation. We should always ask ourselves about the psychic conditions that this or that technological «advance» creates. It's not just a question of objects, methods and possibilities, but of the arrival of a new type of man, and therefore of a new kind of human relationship. The whole edifice of what constitutes our humanity is being turned upside down, as we've seen since the smartphone revolution.

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We'd like birth to be the fruit of a stratagem. Literally. The start-up company assures us that «reproduction will increasingly be a matter of genetic selection and data analysis - and less and less a matter of sexuality». It takes a very corrupt soul to be seduced by such a statement.

This article reminds us that science is silent on the ends to be pursued. It is not for science to say what is desirable, nor for what it makes possible to determine our position. The human profession is certainly one that will not be replaced by artificial intelligence, and it's urgent that we regain a taste for it. We urgently need to revive, on a large scale, the practices that offer a certain calm and a sense of depth - both moral and temporal. Whether we make «super-babies» or not, whether we implant NeuroLink chips or not, the mind and the spoken word must remain our cradle and our ideal.

The trainer Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a social phenomenon in each issue. Watch his videos on the YouTube channel «La Cartouche».

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