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Gene Therapy: Technology isn’t Good or Bad – Only Those Using or Abusing it Are…
Technology is neither good nor bad – it depends solely on who is using and and why. Technology cannot be “un-invented.” The best way to prevent abuse is to proliferate the technology into the hands of those who will use it to help rather than harm.
Simply rejecting and “wishing” technology away is the best and fastest way to ensure it is concentrated in the hands of those who will abuse it most.
My previous video introducing gene therapy and how Western pharmaceutical corporations are attempting to price it out of reach of the public who paid for the research in the first place:
Gene Therapy is Revolutionary & Really Works – so Why Isn’t it Mainstream?
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While there are multiple reasons to dislike, despise, or just reject Martin Heidegger and his philosophy, his views about technology are insightful (and are spoken in similar ways by Husserl and many post-war skeptics of progress that goes through technology). First of all, technology is not science and the enlightenment of reason. Second, and this is an essential aspect of Heidegger on technology, it is a trap that captures the imagination and rationality of society, binding us into the illusion that the only way out of the crises that befall us (largely due to the rationality of technology). We need reason in its widest and most open manner that includes values and moral reason (from Kant to Husserl, Heidegger and beyond).
Technology fails as a cure for the ills that dependence upon technology produces led Heidegger toward the end of his life to say, “Only a [g]od can save us now.”
We can not have nuclear weapons. And we could have a thriving society in a global, pluralistic democratic and representational, state of ‘perpetual peace.’ To forget this is to fall prey to perpetual crises or worse.
Answers to crises will include technology for sure, but technology that is fully reigned in by a universal spirit of reason and open, grounded science. That may include decisions and policies like what you propose, but to conclude that these technologies are here to stay, or that they play a role in future society is just a failure to see past technology as a techne, acquired skills. Not a universal science, but an elevation of the brilliant successes of technological rationality to heights, but that have no universal grounding to support this valuation. (What if the U.S. had refused to build the bomb. Or to use it. Or even the U.S.S.R. Short of the nuclear war we are always close to having, how much worse [or better] might things have been or are? Same goes for the use of gene therapy. Given all the ways we could improve the quality of health for humanity, including reducing environmental and social causes and exacerbations of cancers and other diseases gene therapy might be used to treat, what are we sacrificing by pursuing this line of technology? How many die needlessly while hopes and capital are poured into a system that turns health into technological fixes? No, we cannot assume that technology as we currently have it or value it is a technology of an enlightened society that places scientific reason and open speculative and theoretical inquiry and ground for social organization ahead of the bells and whistles of arts of reason.