Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #387: When Utopias Fail: Marxism, Wokeism, and the Rise of Geneticism

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Being Catholic #387: When Utopias Fail: Marxism, Wokeism, and the Rise of Geneticism · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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We're going to have a great show for you today. I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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And if you'd like to call us, our number is 309-807-2427.
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Again, that's 309-807-2427.
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And you've probably noticed that Lynn and I have been gone for a few weeks.
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We've had a lot of things that could come up here in the last couple of weeks.
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We had a class reunion, my class reunion, and Lynn attended with me.
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And then we had a number of other things and just weren't able to make it.
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And it's been sort of strange here with all this hot weather all the way up
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into October here. But I guess it's going to cool off here coming up in the next week.
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And hopefully we'll have some nice fall weather coming up as well.
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And we're going to talk a little bit today.
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We're going to talk about secular utopias.
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Here it is. I'm looking at so many different things here. We're going to talk
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about secular utopias. We've had Marxism.
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And we've had Wokeism.
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And now there is Geneticism. And we'll talk a little bit about the zombies living dead under that.
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Get to it in a little bit too. and that's very, very interesting and sort of macabre.
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Before we start, I'm going to ask Lynn if she has anything she would like to say.
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Oh, it's good to be back and to get into a kind of normal routine, I guess.
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It's just been, like Bob said, a lot going on in the family and stuff.
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My brother passed away, and then within a week,
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very good friends of ours, came from Florida for the class reunion 65 years
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ago. It was our class reunion.
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But he came, and he didn't make it to the reunion, and he passed.
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God called him home, too, so we had two funerals in a week.
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And, you know, with my brother and stuff, just a lot of things going on.
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So he's finally resting in peace, hopefully. So I'd like to know what's going on with the weather.
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It's been too warm, too warm.
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You know, the leaves on the trees are not really turning their colors, and it's so dry.
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My gosh, how many fires have we had out in the fields with the farmers who are out trying to harvest?
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And it looks like it'd be a really good harvest, too. But the machinery catches
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the fields on fire in some place, more often this year than ever before.
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Just all kinds of strange things going on.
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But, you know, they say those caterpillars are great big black fuzzy fuzzy things.
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And they say that brings a really bad winter.
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So we'll see. Well, Mom, you want to get on to what it is that you're talking about?
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I'm going to talk about some of the secular utopias.
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We've had the so-called utopia of Marxism, and then we've got the so-called
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utopia of wokeism, and now we have forthcoming this so-called utopia of geneticism coming up.
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We're going to talk about that. It just seems that people can't quit believing
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that somehow or another we are going to create this wonderful utopia paradise on earth.
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And none of them have worked out. And I want to just talk a little bit about that.
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So I'm going to read here from an article by the editor of First Things, R.R. Reno.
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It's in the October 2025 issue of First Things. I think it's the current issue here.
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And the article is titled Eugenics Under the Flag of Choice.
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The first article, and we'll read from that. And.
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On August 7th, Ross Douthat, or Douthat, I'm not sure how the name is pronounced,
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interviewed Noor Siddiqui on his podcast, Interesting Times.
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Siddiqui is the founder and CEO of Orchid, a company that performs comprehensive
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genetic screening of embryos that are used in IVF.
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It was a revealing conversation. At the outset, Douthat probes the accuracy
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of Sadiqit's claim that her company provides reliable genetic information.
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Those familiar with Elizabeth Holmes and the deceptive practices of her company,
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Theranos, have learned to be wary of biotech entrepreneurs who have an interest
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in hyping their products.
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And there's a utopian side to biotech, which likewise encourages overselling results.
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As the interview proceeds, doubt that turns to important moral questions.
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Siddiqui makes much of her desire to provide parents with the tools to help
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their children avoid suffering.
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And there's that avoid suffering. How many times have that idea of avoiding
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suffering led to things that have been worse than avoiding suffering,
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mercy killing, and so forth? Oh, gee.
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You know, part of our faith is we believe, you know, that...
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You can't get through life without some suffering, and that's the way it is. That's life.
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They deny everything that goes along with life, don't they? Yes.
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And suffering can be offered up on behalf of, you know, as a sacrifice, on behalf of yourself.
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Yes, you're offered up in conjunction with the suffering that Christ did on the cross.
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Exactly. They put it with Christ's
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suffering on the cross, and then he was offered up at Mass and so forth.
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And this is something that Catholics understand and have understood from a long
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time ago, that this is a fallen world, and there is such a thing in it as concupiscence.
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And that's something I want to emphasize as well as we go through this.
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There's such a thing as concupiscence. and even the idea of free speech and
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all of these things are sort of dependent on this theory of John Locke that
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people are born a blank slate.
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And our founders, some of our founders subscribe to that theory as well.
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And they were Protestants, not Catholics.
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And under Catholicism, of course, we don't think that people were born a blank
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slate or tainted with original sin.
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And so there's a problem there because this is a fallen world.
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And there's a tendency to go downhill if we're not very, very careful.
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But at any rate, we'll get back to this. And it says, she cites her mother who
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began to lose her vision as a young adult.
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Who would want her child to endure a genetic disease?
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But as Doubted points out, employing technology to weed out embryos with defects
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amounts to ensuring that people like Sadiqi's mother will not be born.
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Indeed, it implies that it would have been better off if her mother had not been born.
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So you can see where this might, the direction that this might be going.
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Something like the Nazi category of life unworthy of life hovers uncomfortably
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in the background of ORCID and its use of technology to identify defective DNA
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and embryos so that implantation and birth can be avoided.
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And you have to remember, in Nazi Germany, they did this under the guise of
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mercy killing, under the guise of actually ending suffering.
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And they didn't do everything as some kind of a punishment.
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This was done supposedly to improve the race and also to avoid unnecessary suffering and so on.
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And look what it led to. And then there's the inconvenient fact that IVF produces
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more embryos than can be used.
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The term itself introduces the unsettling notion that human life is something
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we make available to ourselves for our own purposes or disposal.
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So it emphasizes that again, that people are things to be used for our own selfish purposes.
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When it comes to current technology, if the goal is eugenic selection,
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and there's that word selection,
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there's no way around the need to produce embryos outside the womb so that the
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biological material for generic testing can be gathered.
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And there's the word generic in there, or genetic.
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I'm sorry, it's not generic. Genetic testing can be gathered.
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And they must be frozen, held in reserve, so that once test results are received,
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the parents, the owners of the embryos, can make their selections.
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That sounds like something out of the Nazi death camps. Every so often they
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had selections as to see who would be worth keeping alive and who had to go
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into the ovens or be shot.
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And that's another something that people should realize is that most people
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under the Nazis were put to death by shooting.
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That's how most people were killed, not in the gas chambers,
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although, you know, the gas chambers, there were some in certain camps.
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But for the most part, most people were just shot.
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Siddiqua reports that she and her husband have 16 embryos on ice,
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ready for when the time is right.
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She wants two boys and two girls, whom she will pick out of the embryo tray,
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guided by the orchid report as to which enjoy the most genetically auspicious profiles.
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If you are starting to feel queasy hearing this, then you're not alone.
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Throughout the interview, Siddiqui repeatedly emphasizes that her company is
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helping parents make choices.
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If you have moral concerns, then you can steer clear of this technology.
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Nothing is being imposed. Or is it?
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For this celebration of empowerment is silent about the embryos,
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who are objects of choice rather than subjects.
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It's a convenient omission. In other words,
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everything seems to be talked about as choice,
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except the fact that the embryos are the subjects of these choices,
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and the embryos are being treated here as objects, and the embryos don't seem
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to have any choice at all.
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And isn't this exactly what happens in abortion?
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And some abortions are taking place in this country that are going right up
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until nine months, and babies being killed in the womb right up until about nine months.
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And this is being called, you know, if you don't want to do this,
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you can steer clear, you don't have to make these choices if you don't want to and so forth.
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Nothing is being imposed upon you, but something is being imposed upon the babies
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who don't have much of a choice.
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Douthat is skeptical of Siddiqui's claim that nobody is or will be coerced.
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The utilitarian logic of embryo eugenics will not be satisfied by the single
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criterion of free choice.
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Things will go further as they always do, and they will. How can a responsible society...
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Allow people to bring children into the world the old-fashioned way when that
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method ignores genetic screening, which promises to limit disease and suffering.
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And there's that limiting suffering again.
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Here's doubt that's entirely plausible speculation.
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And coming right back to that, you know, the fact is that things always do go further.
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Look what happened in COVID. I mean, people decided that they didn't want to take a vaccination,
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and look what they were told that
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they were losing their jobs or they couldn't travel on airplanes or all kinds
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of other punishments or responsibilities and so forth were taken away or pushed upon them and so on.
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It wasn't long at all before there was all kinds of pressures and so forth for
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people to get that COVID shot, even though later on we found out that a lot
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of the stuff we were told was not only just misinformation, it was just plain old-fashioned lies.
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But it goes on here. Here is a doubt that's entirely plausible speculation on
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this idea of how things will go further.
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He says, I think it is very likely in the future where the ORCID process becomes
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a kind of norm that you get a whole set of medical pressures.
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Like, what are you, a bad parent? You are not going to test your prospective kids?
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You can imagine a kind of tipping point or cascade where you go from this is
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a choice that a certain number of parents do to this is the expectation that
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the medical system imposes on expectant parents.
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And that's exactly what happened under COVID.
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The medical system imposed a certain expectations on people to get vaccinations and so on.
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And it'll do the same thing here. It won't be just some kind of a free choice.
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In fact, we were already at this point. Today, tests are performed on pregnant
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women that often end with strong counsel in favor of abortion if results show
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the possibility of genetic defects.
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And there are a lot of women who choose to have children, especially women,
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you know, Catholic women who don't believe in abortion.
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And it turns out, in spite of all the dire predictions that their babies would
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be born with defects and so forth, that the children were born perfectly well,
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in spite of all of the downward predictions.
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And in a lot of cases, those babies would have been aborted and are aborted
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and are being aborted without the people knowing for sure that there's going
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to be dire consequences and people unwilling to take the risk and more and more
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pressure being put upon them to
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have an abortion because supposedly there will be a defect in the child.
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The pressure will only increase as the technological means for eugenic selection
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becomes more effective.
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We're going to have to stop here and take a break. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're back from our break, and we're talking here about the secular utopias,
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Marxism, Wokeism, and now this idea of geneticism giving us another utopia.
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We can see, looking back, how Marxism worked out, and we'll talk about that
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in a little bit. and we can see right now how wokeism is working out and we'll
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talk about that in a little bit too.
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But right now we're talking about the coming genetic so-called utopia that people
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are pushing and predicting and we're looking at the downside of it here in an article by R.R.
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Reno in the magazine First Things and it goes on here and it says.
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Duthet also wonders whether a technological and calculating approach to bringing
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children into the world fundamentally alters the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood.
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Certainly, the husband and wife must do something to produce a child.
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There is a choice. They need to engage in sexual intercourse.
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But there is a greater element of givenness.
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The child comes, as it were, not always, but sometimes.
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In the language of the Bible, the child is begotten, not made.
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In other words, begotten means caused. The child is caused, the child is not made.
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I mean, the child is not some kind of an artificial product that we put together
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out of parts or something and make.
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But that even may be ending here, as we'll see in a little bit.
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Dothat presses his question. If 90% of babies are born through IVF,
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and having sex and having a baby out of that becomes this weird thing that the
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Amish do, and he's just using this one to reference to the Amish.
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In other words, just that we sometimes often say, well, the Amish are different.
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They set themselves apart by doing things differently.
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And so if having a regular baby becomes something like that,
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something that only, you know, a certain separate people do.
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Aren't you pushing some really important and intimate aspect of human experience
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out of human experience?
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Put simply, isn't a eugenic approach to childbearing dehumanizing?
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In other words, you're dehumanizing the relationship between the husband and wife.
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Siddiqui finds the question baffling. She cites her company's maxim.
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Sex is for fun. Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.
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In other words, we're to have sex for fun, and having babies is an entirely different thing.
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But that does exactly what Dutha is talking about.
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It sort of dehumanizes the relationship between the husband and wife and dehumanizes sex.
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The moral myopia is astounding. In other words, the moral blindness here is astounding.
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But is it surprising?
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As Sadiqui points out, because of the almost universal use of contraception,
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sex is already for fun and not for babies 99% of the time.
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She goes on to underscore the utilitarian dynamic that's very likely to ensure
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that doubt and worries are well-founded.
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Sadiqvi says, I think that the vast majority of parents in the future are not
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going to roll the dice with their children's health.
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In other words, exactly what Dalton is predicting,
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Sadiqvi agrees with that this will come true,
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that most people will feel pressured not to roll the dice with their children's
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health, and that somehow or another they have to go along with this process
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of making sure that embryos and so forth are not defective.
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And all that goes with it.
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And Reno goes on and says, Count me among those who see danger and darkness
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in Siddiqui's prediction.
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In the early decades of the 20th century, many elites became convinced that
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communism and socialism marked a new and higher stage of progress.
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And here we come with the Marxism.
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Economic life had to be brought under the control of reason.
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It needed to be planned and managed at every level.
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At first, good results seemed to flow from this approach.
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After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, the American journalist Lincoln Steffens
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intoned, I have seen the future and it works.
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But soon enough, rational planning brought inefficiencies, sclerosis,
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oppression, and mass starvation.
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In other words, communism did not work.
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And all of this idea, this secular idea, this wonderful system that was supposed
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to be imposed upon us and it was going to make the future so wonderful became a nightmare instead.
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And one of the things that people don't realize, again, is concupiscence.
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Things have a tendency to go downhill. Human beings have flaws and taints.
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And the fact is, is that there was this Lamarckian, in the Soviet Union actually,
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and I want to stress this, you had this Lamarckian approach to communism.
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In other words, when communism started to fail and not work,
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Stalin and, of course, in China also, Mao and others began to say it could be made to work.
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And what were one of the ways it could be made to work? One of the ways that
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could be made to work is we had to create a new communist man.
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Well, how could this be done?
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Well, back at that time, it certainly couldn't be done genetically, could it?
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No, you have to compromise, don't you?
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No, it had to be made, the communist man had to be made in a different way.
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It had to be imposed somehow by repetition and by making people go through the
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motions of being communist and so forth and saying all the right things and
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doing all the right things.
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This Lamarckian approach. And what do I mean by the Lamarckian approach?
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Well, there was a communist scientist in Russia at the time, Lysenko was his name.
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And he believed in the Lamarckian theory of evolution.
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And what is the Lamarckian theory of evolution? Well, it was a theory that acquired
25:36
traits somehow could be passed on to the offspring.
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You know, it's the story of how the giraffe got its long neck.
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You know, the giraffe had to reach up into the trees to get the leaves and so
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forth that were not picked off by, you know, lower reaching animals and by giraffes
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that couldn't reach as high.
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And so in this process of stretching and stretching the neck,
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and there were even stories about giraffes that caught their necks in the crotch
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of the tree and pulled and got their neck stretched longer and so forth,
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that those particular acquired traits, you know, in a particular giraffe could
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be passed on to the offspring.
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And this was the theory that somehow or another you could plant crops in the
26:20
north, and if you planted enough crops in the north there, that somehow automatically
26:24
they would adapt to the cold weather.
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And of course, none of this worked. And it went against all farming principles and so forth.
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And all kinds of experiments like that went on in Russia. There were total disasters and failures.
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And of course, it failed to produce the communist man. People kept on having
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the same qualities that they always had.
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And the fact is that people will work hard for things that they can own for
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themselves, but they're not going to work hard for things that they don't own
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and that other people can use.
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And so that if they work hard in a farm field, for example, and they get one-tenth
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of the pros to that farm field, whether they work hard or not,
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they're not going to work as hard. I mean, that's just the way people are.
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And so this new communist man never materialized because that whole approach,
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that whole Lysenko and Lamarckian approach doesn't work. Anyone could have told them that.
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They even had experiments where scientists had laboratory experiments where
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they kept cutting the tails off of white laboratory rats and then breeding those
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rats to see if there would be rats that would grow.
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You know, that would be born with shorter or without tails.
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Of course, it never happened. They continued to have rats born with regular tails.
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Well, the Jewish people could have told them that such an experiment wouldn't
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work because for centuries, you know, thousands of years,
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they had circumcision of their children, and yet children were not born,
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you know, with circumcised genitals. So, I mean, they're boys.
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So, I mean, this whole idea of cutting the tails off rats was simply a cruelty
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to rats that didn't need to be done.
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Anyone could have told them it's not going to work. And so the communist man
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couldn't be brought about that way of this.
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The Lamarckian theory of evolution. Too much conformity is demanded.
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Right. And he goes on, he goes on here, he says, in my lifetime,
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elites became convinced that we were called to engineer a new,
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more diverse, inclusive, and equitable culture. And now he's talking here about wokeism.
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And then we all are living in it. That somehow or another, if we couldn't engineer
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a new Soviet man and we couldn't, and Marxism and so forth wouldn't work because
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we're unable to engineer a man, you know,
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adapted to Marxism, then somehow we could engineer a culture that would be adapted
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to something like it by simply engineering out all evil.
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Engineering out all, you know, hostilities and so forth by forcing people to be totally tolerant.
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Tolerance then became the whole new virtue.
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Tolerance was the supreme virtue, the virtue above everything.
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We would have to tolerate everything. If people wanted to pretend that they
29:23
were women instead of men and vice versa, we had to go along with it.
29:27
And all the other stuff, all cultures were equal.
29:31
It didn't make any difference whether one culture was progressive or another
29:37
culture was progressive.
29:39
All cultures were equal and we had to pretend that this was the case and we're still doing it.
29:44
And this dream of reason motivated a massive effort to uproot traditional social
29:52
norms, even to the point of regulating the use of pronouns.
29:55
In other words, if people pretended that they were women or men pretended that
30:02
they were women or women pretended they were men, we had to pretend along with them.
30:06
And this is still going on. And you even find it among conservatives.
30:10
You find, for example, conservative voters.
30:14
Television stations, and so forth, using these proper pronouns to refer to someone
30:19
who thinks that they can change over from a woman to a man or a man to a woman, which is ridiculous.
30:26
It's like the people, you know, the sane society going along with the people in the institution.
30:32
The upshot, as we now know, is not a wonderful culture of rainbow solidarity,
30:37
but instead a dysfunctional, sour, and polarized society populated by atomized, unhappy people,
30:45
many whom are debilitated by mental illnesses or supported by self-destructive addictions.
30:52
And we find that. We find a lot of these.
30:55
And so we have to deny that this is the case, even though it's right in front of us.
30:59
For example, a lot of the transgender people that we call transgender are actually
31:07
committing violent crimes.
31:08
A lot of it may be due to the hormones and stuff that they're receiving,
31:12
or it may be due to the fact that they are very unstable and unhappy people
31:17
trying to be something that they're not,
31:20
and having people go along with it, and they become totally confused,
31:24
and they become angry at themselves, and then angry at everybody.
31:29
And the better explanation, of course, is that we are simply saying that all
31:34
cultures are equal, and we are allowing the devil to have a playground because
31:39
we are no longer believing in the devil.
31:41
We are no longer believing in Satan, and Satan is running wild in our culture,
31:45
and we're having killings and shootings and people out of control everywhere
31:50
because of our inability to actually behave according to rational and reasonable behavior.
32:02
Again, rational planning failed. So it failed in trying to make the Soviet man,
32:09
you know, by some kind of evolution, just acquired trait evolution.
32:15
And it failed to make the perfect world by pretending that all cultures and
32:21
all norms and so forth are all equal.
32:24
And if we treat everybody somehow or another as being equal and as functional
32:29
as anybody else, everything will be all right that way.
32:32
That is also failing. We're having a high degree of young people who are committing
32:38
suicide and having all kinds of emotional problems, and we simply are not facing it.
32:44
We're pretending that it's due to something else or, you know, due to the.
32:49
Actually, more and more fantasy is needed somehow to cure the very thing that
32:56
is being caused, and this is going on as well.
32:59
So we have two sort of utopias that have failed, and now we are looking at a genetic utopia.
33:07
If we couldn't engineer a utopian society culturally, and we couldn't engineer
33:13
a utopian society through Marxism and the Soviet man or the Marxist man,
33:19
then maybe we can actually genetically engineer a new man and we'll have a utopian society that way.
33:27
And that's what we're talking here about the genetic revolution.
33:30
We are now poised to embark on an even more ambitious dream of reason,
33:35
one that aims to improve upon the crude mechanisms of evolution.
33:41
And this now is actually going in genetically and actually creating an evolution
33:48
that actually works. genetically.
33:50
And this will somehow or another create new people and a new breed of humans
33:55
that will somehow be better and more perfect and create a society that is more
34:01
perfect than the one we have now.
34:03
And we can see what happened with the other two based on this kind of reasoning.
34:07
And it's likely that this society that people believe in now is going to go the same way.
34:13
And we've already seen some of the hints at it and what's going on.
34:18
This eugenic project advance under the flag of choice, and there it is again,
34:23
is sure to follow the pattern of earlier dreams of reason.
34:27
God's created order is minute and complex.
34:30
Our eugenic efforts will disrupt the natural order in ways we cannot foresee,
34:36
creating a genetic ecosystem as clotted and broken as the economy of the Soviet Union.
34:43
The greatest threat posed by eugenics practiced on a mass scale is not that
34:48
it will succeed and that we will be dehumanized by a brave new world,
34:53
although that too may come to pass.
34:55
No, the more profound peril rests in its almost certain failure and the resulting
35:01
mess we will make of the fundamental building blocks of life.
35:04
And that's probably what is coming.
35:07
But even if it sort of succeeds, it can become a Aldous Huxley type brave new world.
35:14
If you've read that book and you understand, you know, the prediction of Aldous
35:18
Huxley, what would happen if you actually had a perfect world.
35:22
And we'll get to that a little bit in the next section about the new man that can be created.
35:28
So stay with us. We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic
35:32
with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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38:05
Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:10
We're back from our break. We're talking about secular utopias.
38:14
We were talking, just finished talking about the fact that the failure of Marxism
38:20
and its attempt at creating a new type of person through simply plain repetition and force,
38:27
the Lamarckian theory of evolution, that is that somehow or another acquired
38:32
traits can be passed on to their people.
38:35
The offspring, of course, doesn't work. And then we were talking also about the wokeism,
38:41
the idea that somehow or another, if we just disestablish all norms and call
38:47
everything, all cultures equal.
38:50
And decide that human beings can decide whatever norms they want to live by
38:56
and also whatever sex and so forth else they want to live by,
39:00
we can create a perfect society that way. And of course, it's not working out.
39:05
We're having, as I said, our younger people who are confused and often many
39:10
of them committing suicide.
39:11
And we're living in a sour, sort of mean-spirited society that's worse than
39:17
the society that the regular norms
39:20
that we came from. And now there's this idea of a new genetic utopia.
39:25
If we couldn't create the Soviet man through simply force, now we can do it
39:30
genetically, the person that can be adapted to our whole new society.
39:37
And here is one of the ways that I'm going to get into in which we can do it.
39:41
There's another article in that same magazine, in First Things Magazine,
39:46
the October 2025 issue, called Zombie Bioethics.
39:52
And I'll read from it. And it's the idea that we can create human beings,
39:57
you know, sort of like models of human beings that we want, that we can use to experiment on.
40:06
It says, a recent article in MIT Technology Review carries the strange title.
40:13
Ethically Sourced Spare Human Bodies Could Revolutionize Medicine.
40:18
Three Stanford biologists and ethicists argue for the use of so-called bodyoids
40:25
in science and medicine.
40:28
This infelicistist term refers to hypothetical modified human bodies created from stem cells,
40:36
bodies that have been genetically altered so that they lack brains and thus
40:41
presumably are without consciousness.
40:44
The authors acknowledge that we do not yet have the technical capability to
40:49
create such beings, but recent advances in stem cells,
40:54
gene editing, and artificial uteruses provide a pathway to producing living
41:00
human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain.
41:07
Strictly speaking, artificial uteruses are not necessary for the development of bodyoids.
41:14
Such a reprogrammed embryo could theoretically be created in a lab and implanted
41:20
in a woman's uterus, as is done with IVF.
41:24
But the notion that an entity regarded as subhuman should be born from a human
41:30
mother seems too gruesome even for these bioethical pioneers to contemplate.
41:37
The authors admit that many will find the prospect of body-oids disturbing,
41:42
but they argue that a potentially unlimited source of spare human bodies will
41:48
be immensely useful and should be pursued.
41:52
We could, for example, harvest the organs of these presumably non-sentient humans
41:58
and conduct experiments on them in order to test drugs and other medical interventions.
42:04
The authors even suggest that it would be more ethical to do drug testing on
42:10
humans who cannot feel pain because they lack a nervous system than on animals that can feel pain.
42:17
There are other potential benefits for animal species as well.
42:22
They aver, since we could use animal bodyoids to avoid causing pain and suffering
42:27
in the cows and pigs we slaughtered for food.
42:30
Human bodyoids are not entirely within the realm of science fiction.
42:35
Scientists have recently produced embryoids, or synthetic embryos,
42:40
from reprogrammed stem cells without the use of sperm and eggs.
42:45
Embryoids are living entities that seem to develop as human embryos do,
42:52
but that presumably lack the capacity for full human development.
42:56
We do not know for sure that they do, as they are typically destroyed after
43:02
14 days before the heart and brain have begun to develop.
43:06
Just as advocates for embryoids argue that their innovation allows us to avoid
43:12
the ethical problems associated with embryo-destructive research,
43:17
so advocates for body-oids propose to provide us with ethnically sourced spare human bodies.
43:25
The Christian ethicist Oliver O'Donovan described a position too familiar to
43:33
technological society, that of having achieved something that we do not know
43:38
how to describe responsibly.
43:40
In the case of bodioids, I submit advocates do not know how to describe them at all.
43:47
One can hear them stumbling over their words and fumbling with descriptors.
43:53
Bodyoids are human bodies, or rather human-like bodies, but not human in any
43:59
morally relevant sense.
44:01
They lack brains, after all, but sufficiently human that we can harvest their
44:06
organs for transplant and conduct experiments on them to see how real humans would respond to drugs.
44:16
Indeed, they are of interest to scientists precisely because they are so,
44:21
well, so very human, but not really, well, for the most part.
44:26
Well then, what are human bodyoids?
44:29
Long before ethicists began to contemplate living, or at least undead,
44:34
human creatures who lack all brain function, such entities were explored in
44:40
science fiction and horror films.
44:43
The precise name for such a creature is zombie. The concept has roots in Haitian
44:49
folklore, where the term is zombie,
44:52
referring to a person who has been brought back from the dead through magical
44:56
means to serve as a mindless slave.
44:59
The problem with creating zombies, our story suggests, is that they always come back to bite us.
45:07
Creating them diminishes our humanity.
45:11
Are not zombies precisely what advocates the body always want to conjure into existence?
45:18
A mindless slave, biologically and physiologically human in all relevant ways,
45:25
that can nevertheless be experimented upon, harvested, and killed with impunity?
45:31
Indeed, by our current definition of brain death, such an entity cannot actually
45:37
be killed because it is already dead. In this, too, it resembles a zombie.
45:44
One can easily imagine a B-movie horror feature titled Revenge of the Bodyoids.
45:52
The concept of brain death, defined as total cessation of all brain function,
45:58
arguably paved the way for advocates of the creation and exploitation of bodyoids.
46:04
As the authors of the article point out, recently we have even begun using for
46:11
experiments the animated cadavers of people who have been declared legally dead,
46:17
who have lost all brain function, but whose other organs continue to function
46:22
with mechanical assistance.
46:24
What are we to make of the term animated cadaver, which seems to express a manifest contradiction?
46:32
Advocates for the brain death criterion argue that death is the disintegration
46:37
of the unified organism, and the brain is responsible for maintaining organismic unity.
46:44
Liberal bioethicists also argue that without consciousness, though there may
46:50
be a living human being, there is no morally or legally relevant personhood.
46:55
But these arguments do not withstand scrutiny.
46:59
The brain modulates the coordinated activity of the other organs.
47:04
It does not create that coordinated activity.
47:07
That is accomplished by the organic formal unity of the body as a whole,
47:12
which modern science, with its reductionistic analysis of the body into component
47:18
parts, fails to discern.
47:20
And I might mention the fact that, you know, a few weeks ago,
47:25
I read about the fact that people with their cortex and so forth gone and with
47:33
only mostly these encephalus people,
47:36
with only the outside areas of the brain, some of these people are very conscious
47:42
and get along quite well.
47:45
And scientists now are beginning to understand that consciousness may not come
47:49
from the parts of the brain that we think it comes from.
47:52
It may be somehow that the brain is in contact with the universe itself and
47:59
there is something in the universe, may we call it God, that actually causes
48:04
consciousness and causes life in the first place.
48:08
And that the so-called brain dead people, in other words, if the person was
48:12
born without any brain at all, it might be a non-person in that sense that there
48:17
might be no consciousness.
48:19
But now they're talking about people that you can experiment on and that would
48:24
not have to be kept so-called alive with artificial machines and so forth.
48:30
That would have enough of a brain, just a minimum, that would keep the heart
48:35
and lungs and other parts going, but would be so-called brain dead.
48:40
And that person would be considered then really non-living and non-subject to pain and so forth.
48:47
But the fact is, is that there may be a consciousness there that we are not
48:53
aware of at all, and we're not aware of at all, and we're beginning to find that out.
48:59
So, this is another aspect that we don't really understand.
49:05
And this whole thing of brain death and so forth may not be what it seems to be at all.
49:10
We have to remember that that whole term, brain death and so forth,
49:13
was invented mostly when organ transplants began to be made possible.
49:18
And we had to have the organs removed while the body, in effect, was still alive.
49:25
And so we get this idea that when the brain dies, so supposedly that the person is dead.
49:32
You know, that may not be the case. It might be that there is a consciousness
49:36
there that is aware and is possible even without the parts of the brain and
49:45
so forth that we think is responsible for consciousness.
49:48
So this is another factor that we're going to have to take into consideration.
49:52
So all of these utopian ideas and so forth may not be the utopian ideas at all,
49:58
as neither were the utopian ideas of Marxism nor the utopian ideas of Marxism.
50:05
The body of a brain-dead person on a ventilator maintains homeostasis and coordinated unity of functions.
50:12
The kidneys make urine, the liver makes bile, the immune system fights off infections,
50:16
wounds heal, hair and fingernails grow, endocrine organs secrete hormones,
50:21
broken bones heal, and broken skin repairs.
50:24
And the fact is, how long would it be before you start making body oids before
50:29
scientists will say, oh,
50:31
well, we can give them enough of a brain to do these things,
50:35
and they still won't really be human in the sense that a full-brained person would be.
50:41
And we can still then keep them from having pain, and we can still experiment
50:46
on them and use them as mindless slaves.
50:49
So, to all appearances, the patient in this state is not in fact dead.
50:54
Some medical ethicists have therefore quite sensibly questioned the validity
51:00
of brain death as a criterion for death.
51:03
The brain death criterion was developed by a Harvard Medical School Committee
51:07
in 1968 to free up ICU beds and promote organ transplantation,
51:13
with the death itself forming the foundation of the organ transplant enterprise.
51:19
For organ transplantation rests upon a paradox, perhaps an outright contradiction.
51:25
A dead donor whose body with its precious organ is still living.
51:29
In other words, you can't have somebody that's really dead to be an organ donor.
51:34
After a person is pronounced brain dead, if the family refuses transplantation,
51:40
or if the organs are deemed unsuitable for transplant, the following situations emerge.
51:46
Once the ventilator is turned off, the patient's heart may continue beating
51:50
for several minutes or even a few hours.
51:53
Surely we would not send such a dead patient to the morgue, cremate her,
51:57
or bury her while the heart still beats.
52:02
Should we then give a drug like potassium chloride to stop the heart of the
52:06
supposedly already dead patient?
52:09
In some cases, we wait a day or two to shut off the machines of a patient who
52:14
is pronounced brain dead to allow family to travel and be at the bedside when
52:19
the ventilator is discontinued and eventually the heart stops?
52:22
Will the family witness the death of the patient or merely the cessation of
52:27
efforts to animate an already dead corpse?
52:30
If the latter, why would family members want to be present for that?
52:34
At any rate, considering these oddities and absurdities, which stem from the
52:38
legal fiction that brain death is the death of the person, total brain failure
52:43
is a more accurate term than brain death.
52:46
In other words, we're getting into all kinds of areas here and which we're not
52:50
sure about already, thinking along these lines.
52:54
But that's probably not going to stop people from thinking that this will be the next genetic step,
53:00
that geneticism that is creating perfect people or even creating people that
53:07
we can experiment on will somehow or another create sort of a utopia on Earth.
53:13
And the whole idea of Catholicism, at least.
53:17
In our religious teaching is that there isn't any utopia on Earth,
53:22
that people do suffer from concupiscence, and all this idea of people being
53:27
born a blank sheet is wrong, and we may even be wrong about how the brain works
53:35
and how consciousness works.
53:36
We certainly are wrong about how life comes into existence.
53:40
It certainly doesn't come into existence through evolution, because evolution
53:44
works on life that's already in existence, but life has to get into existence,
53:50
and we really simply don't know where it's come from. it comes from.
53:54
And so there are all kinds of religious reasons standing in the way of all these things.
54:02
And this next utopia on earth will probably not be cracked up to be what it
54:08
is. What do you think, Lynn?
54:11
No, I think that's right. I mean, how do they think they're going to improve on God's creation?
54:17
That's what I think. You can't. They probably aren't. You can't be God.
54:22
They probably aren't. I think you are, but you aren't.
54:25
And you're going to get your comeuppance one way or another.
54:28
And playing God. So before we do all these things, it might be.
54:31
One thing I want to mention is, you know, that program on TV that comes on the show, The Walking Dead?
54:39
Well, if that is an example of brain dead, I don't know what else is.
54:45
Exactly. We may have the real. We have that now. You look at the streets in
54:49
California, and the people can't even stand up.
54:53
They're brain dead. True. Drugs.
54:56
So at any rate, it's something to think about all these utopias that reason
55:01
has brought us to that are total failures.
55:04
And this one coming up here isn't as simple or as good or as great as it is
55:09
cracked up to be. So let's say our prayer.
55:12
St. Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle.
55:16
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:20
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
55:25
by the power of God, thrust into hell, Satan, and all evil spirits who wander
55:31
through the world through the ruin of souls.
55:34
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston.
55:38
On Catholic Spirit Radio, if you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:45
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