Journal of Sacred Work

1) By the year 2050, the world’s population is predicted to reach nine billion people. – United Nations
publication
2) A Texas company has started producing batches of ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can order after reviewing detailed information about…characteristics of the egg and sperm donors. – The Washington Post (1/6/07)

   I remember the shock I felt during a conversation I had with a physician friend of mine after he and his wife returned from a vacation to Kenya. "Weren’t you concerned about AIDs and starvation?" I asked him. "Look Erie," he told me, "there are too many people over there. Something needs to happen to trim the population." It was a if he was talking about Kenyans as a herd of deer.
   Years later, I read the first prediction (above.) I’ve been trying to comprehend it. If the current population is six billion, this means a fifty percent increase in only forty-three years! By the time my grandson is forty-six, he will be one nine hundred billionth of the population instead of one six hundred billionth. Will the difference matter? This depends on how his generation (and ours) handle the challenges of this astonishing growth: whether, for example, we finally confront global warming before the process starts "trimming the population." And whether we become clearer on the value of human life or more confused.
   Now the second news bulletin: science is making the process of becoming a parent easier. Does empowering a potential parent to "select" an embryo raise ethical questions about eugenics?
   These issues will have a critical impact on caregiving…

   The central motivation for compassion is that each of us matters. As
each of us increasingly become images on a computer screen to each
other, the purpose of caregiving can be subverted. People like you and
I who care deeply about the quality of relationships are already in the
minority. We are competing with much more seductive forces. What would
most people under thirty-five rather do: Talk to their friends in person or
play a computer game?  This question could never have been asked when these
thirty-five-year-olds were born.
   Medicine’s rising
capability to clone a human being, replace worn out body parts, and
transplant faces, all provoke questions about the meaning of an individual and how we will be cared for as. Or do they? Regardless of the size of the world’s population, each individual human being is unique, right? Yet will we feel less so as the process of making a human becomes easier? Will the death of anyone of us seem less important in an overpopulated world? Perhaps the world finally fall to the forces predicted by George Orwell in Brave New World. The prospect seems less and less bizzarre. Now, we can envision the specter of a world-wide game of musical chairs in which each death is quietly celebrated because it makes more room for everyone else.
   Increasingly, we may have to be reminded about what is it is that makes us unique.

  I remember hearing this question first from a college professor. One of the answers the class came up with was our opposible thumb. That didn’t sound like anything special to me.  Are we less human if you remove our thumbs? Would all of us be dehumanized if this one digit was eliminated from the human race?
   The more people on earth, and the easier it becomes for science to make copies of us, the more we may ask ourselves how our lives, or any one else’s matter.
   The hope is that the advance of science will provoke us to recognize what many fail to appreciate. The most distinguishing element of human life is the only part that can never be replicated. It is not our bodies or even our brains. It is our souls and how we express ourselves through our unique ability to love each other (or not.) No other animal and no computerized object, no matter how sophisticated, carries this capability. Our souls are not transplantable.
   Advances in science will establish that the essential element in caregiving is not our mechanical ability (something robots can be programmed to replicate) but our capability to love. Indeed, each scientific advance suggests that memory and analytical problem-solving can be done exceedingly well by computers. Robotic surgery is already in place. Most of our appearance can already be changed. Millions of women now have perfectly shaped, but artificial, breasts. Men and women get cheek and chin implants to "strengthen" their appearance. Almost everyone in western civilization can now have white teeth. Doctors now predict that the transplantation of facial bones will enable the sculpting of the "perfect-appearing" human face (whatever that means.) Extending this developmental theory, we could all be designed to look alike!
   As has been true with so many scientific advances, each new development challenges our humanity. My broken leg may appreciate being fixed by a robot. But my humanity wants to be cared for by a loving human being. Do any of us want to spend our final days on earth in the care of machines rather than in the presence of those we love (and who love us?)
   We have been blessed with human life and the ability to choose who we will live our lives. The goal of science is to serve us, not to overpower us. And our goal is simply (and complexly) this: to serve, and to love, each other and the earth into which we were born.