by Harold Brackman, Ph.D.

Martine and Me

“Our efforts to simplify reality cheat others and cheat ourselves.”  
 
Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex (1995)—written with the precision and persuasiveness of a lawyer’s brief and the power of a visionary manifesto—will be viewed by most readers, today and in years hence, as making the case for the transgender movement at a critical juncture in its emergence. Given my long though interrupted association with Martine, which started in the 1970s when then-Martin was an incredibly talented, ambitious UCLA undergraduate living on a shoestring while raising an astonishingly beautiful multi-racial toddler, mine is a more personal perspective. The book and the author for me are part of a web of influences in which my own life as an historian and a man (if Martine will forgive my use of that gender-specific designation!) have been profoundly implicated. 
 
Martine is remarkably knowledgeable and accomplished across a spectrum ranging from law to astronomy to business startups to genetic mapping to bioethics and biotech. So I’m sure she won’t begrudge my claiming an expertise not on her list—that of an historian. What I want to do here is view The Apartheid of Sex through several differing yet complementary historical lenses that may enrich the reader’s appreciation of this watershed book that changed my mind and may change yours. First, however, let me look at how this book makes its case. 
 
The Structure of the Argument

“In the future, labeling people at birth as ‘male’ or ‘female’ will be considered just as unfair as South Africa’s now-abolished practice stamping ‘black’ or ‘white’ on people’s ID cards.”  
 
Though now a biotech CEO rather than the practicing telecommunications law specialist she once was, Martine crafted her book with a lawyer’s skill. The reader will note that repeatedly it makes both primary and secondary arguments so that, even if the former don’t succeed, the latter may prevail . The Apartheid of Sex is a book about the biological and behavioral markers of sex and gender. Its critique of the biology of “either/or” sexual dimorphism and its attack on the behavioral patterns that maintain traditional gender hierarchies are reinforcing yet not dependent on each other for their truth. 
 
The Apartheid of Sex makes scientific arguments (which I think would have impressed Charles Darwin), based on naturalistic evidence drawn from both animal and human evolutionary biology, to support its conclusion that there are no absolute binary male-female distinctions in nature. This summary of the evidence from the animal kingdom produced an indelible impression on me: “The slipper shell (Crepidula fornicate) . . . lives in oyster beds and gradually changes from male, to hermaphrodite, to female in old age. On the other hand, certain Caribbean coral-reef fish start out female and die as males. Many types of fish, such as butter hamlets and swordtails, change sex back and forth to balance the ratio of males to females currently around them. The sex ratio expressed by these types of fish depend on their social surroundings.”
 
Yet suppose the reader refuses to follow Martine in extrapolating from such evidence to her conclusions about the fluid continuum of sex types and male-female human biological differences, and rejects her view that these differences are insignificant compared to the overriding fact of the commonality of “the transgendered brain.” Even then, her book makes a powerful—to me irresistible—case that, assuming an irreducible minimum of biological difference between male and female, these differences are still entirely insufficient to justify the ponderous behavioral superstructure of gender segregation and inequality that have been built into society’s fabric. This discriminatory superstructure is rooted in culture as well as society, and Martine is very hard—perhaps too hard—on the world’s religions (which sometimes have inspired positive change-oriented movements) for being a regressive force: “The thrust of early Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judeo-Christianity was to make women ashamed of their bodies and to thus make it easier for men to control them.” 
 
Martine buttresses her argument against gender discrimination by analyzing the parallels with racial apartheid. The anti -miscegenation laws that imposed a Nazi-like ban on intermarriage across racial lines were carried over from slavery to segregation, persisting until the right to marry of an interracial couple was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967). Except for the bravery of Richard Loving (who died in 1975) and Mildred Loving (who died in 2008),premier golfer Tiger Woods might not be in a position today to nonchalantly describe himself as a CABLINASIAN (Caucasian-Black-Indian-Asian American). Partly because of the pioneering consciousness raising by Martine’s The Apartheid of Sex, the day may be coming when laws against same-sex marriage will be viewed as unjust and anachronistic as laws against interracial marriage. As Martine notes, “immutable race” is already becoming “choosable culture.” The domino to fall is “immutable gender”! Today’s rise of racial and ethnic hybridity opens the door to tomorrow’s embrace of transgenderism as an emerging paradigm. 
 
The 1990s Context

“For most people society’s gender rules are so powerful that they simply go with the flow. But in every society there are the free spirits, the stubborn, and the insistent. In the 1960s they fought for civil rights. In the 1990s they fight for gender rights.” 
 
The Apartheid of Sex and Barack Obama’s Dream from My Father (1995) appeared on the New York Times best seller list within months of each other. What do these books have in common? First, two extraordinary authors, each with a story to tell. The difference between them in the mid-1990s was that Obama’s autobiography of multi-racial origins and the search for African American identity was written by a young man, still in his early thirties, whose life trajectory at the time was defined less by his impressive accomplishments (Ivy League education, president of the Harvard Law Review, South Side Chicago community organizer) than by the unlimited political potential ahead of him. In contrast, Martine Rothblatt, in her early forties, was already a pioneering telecommunications lawyer, visionary entrepreneur, and successful negotiator of the transgender life change that gives the dimension of personal witness and authority to her book. 
 
Though Martine does not note it in her book, she was actually born in the same American heartland city that was Obama’s career destination. From Chicago, Martine’s father , the son of a dentist for the Retail Clerks’ Union, and mother, a speech therapist, moved the Rothblatt family to Southern California.
 
We can see in retrospect that both Obama’s and Martine’s books and lives reflect a sea change that was occurring in American culture in the 1990s. Obama’s end point is his mature African American identity achieved by coming to terms with his heritage from a distant Kenyan father, but the book’s dramatic interest to most readers was the dynamic tale of how Obama navigated his way to this positive result though a perilous sea of cultural ambivalences and psychological conflicts played out on a global stage spanning Hawaii, the American heartland, and his father’s African homeland. Like a hero of Charles Dickens, Obama discovers who he is, but only through pluck and luck. He finally achieves the status of a son who is not so much chosen as self-chosen. Truly, this is an inspiring American as well as African American success story and an autobiographical gem in a tradition running from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X. 
 
Obama’s Dreams is both a classic of African American autobiography and a multiracial testament reflecting the rise of interracial partnerships as well as transracial adoptions. By 1990, only 7 percent of 34 to 35 year-olds were involved in interracial relationships, compared to 14 percent of 18 to 19 year-olds. By 2000, there were 504,000 “white-Asian marriages,” and 924,000 “Hispanic-white marriages” (though Hispanic is really an ethnic category). Projections are that, by the year 2100, over a third of African Americans will marry outside their race as will over half Asian Americans. Twice as many Hispanics will marry non-Hispanics as marry Hispanics. Over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “The problem of the color line is the problem of the twentieth century.” Martine believes that in the twenty-first century, transgenderism will be central to the solution of transcending still-entrenched gender categories and hierarchies.
 
The Apartheid of Sex is not autobiographical except for a few pages at the book’s beginning and end that, however, are critically important in framing the book. Yet as with Obama, Martine takes the reader along on her psychological and cultural odyssey. The author and reader jointly journey through the complexities of sexual biology and gender socialization, identifying yet avoiding the dead ends of stereotyping and prejudice that limit most people’s lives. They then emerge with a sense of the historically contingent creative possibilities of sex and gender development for individuals with the courage and imagination to pursue them. Full of scientific facts, Martine’s book is passionately animated by her faith in life’s exhilarating journey, especially in America, the land of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby.” Martine also reinvents herself—but, unlike Gatsby’s male tragedy, hers is a transgender triumph. 
 
Both The Apartheid of Sex and Dreams from My Father reflect and celebrate the deconstruction of outmoded, socially constructed notions of race and gender and the toppling of traditional barriers to the achievement of the American Dream. In Obama’s case, the transformative dynamic is the “beiging” or “browning” of America,” psychologically as well as demographically, as young people of all ethnicities impatiently reject racism as a relic of the past. Bear in mind that Obama’s only landside in November 2008—by 2-to-1—was among voters 18 to 29 years of age. 
 
In Martine’s case, the inherited psychological and cultural impediments that she targets are not racial but are sexual hierarchies and gender inequalities. Elections won’t clearly mark the fall of these barriers except for the struggle for gay marital rights. Yet headlines attest to how prescient Martine was in arguing that, just as with Obama and race, so do with sex and gender, the future belongs to those who can both see the potential for change and make sea changes!  Here are two examples of how things are changing in line with Martine’s analysis:

In 1995, Martine could only point to “recent experiments in which male baboons were made to serve as surrogate mothers for zygotes fertilized in the test tube.” This story from 2009 speaks for itself: “A 25-year-old transsexual Spaniard claims to be pregnant with twins after artificial insemination in the first such case in Spain, local media reported on Sunday. ‘I am six-and-a-half weeks pregnant’, Ruben Noe Coronado Jimenez, initially named Estefania, told the popular magazine Pronto, saying he took treatment to restart his menstrual cycle. In photos posted on his blog, where he also wrote about the pregnancy, Coronado has a shaved head and a beard.”

In 1995, Martine wrote that “ male cross-dressers are usually[still] deep in the closet.” By 2009, “Any any number of male models gracing the catwalks of the spring menswear shows held recently in Milan and Paris [who are]now getting the casting calls from top designers are guy waifs—all soft and round in the face which only a few seasons ago was sharp angles and strong lines.” There are wearing tank tops and what looks like outerwear corsets The transsexual drag queens beaten at Stonewall are having a measure of vindication bestowed by prestigious fashion designers. We’ve come a significant distance fromthe burlesqued transgender characters in The Rocky Horror Show!
 
Reminding us of another pop cultural classic that dramatized age-old prejudices hiding beneath the veneer of liberal culture, Martine calls for “a modern-day Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner [that] might again star Sidney Poitier, but this time as the father of a daughter about to be married in Hawaii to another woman.” Here again, she prophecies a shift from racial to gender struggles to redefine American culture and character.
 
Obama’s book exploring the trans-racial frontier and Martine’s exploration the transgender frontier are likely to be viewed by future generations as cutting edge documents that helped gestate our new millennium. Today, with an African American president in office, but Hillary Clinton relegated to Secretary of State, gender barriers seem more resistant to change. Martine explores the paradoxes as well as parallels involving these two pathways of change: “Sex is even much more malleable than race—as individualized as our fingerprints. . . . Racial categories are already an affront to mixed-race kids. Sexual categories are an inhibition to gender explorers.” 
 
The 1960s Prelude

“The apartheid of sex is every bit as harmful, painful, and oppressive as the apartheid of race.” 
 
Dramatic recent developments did not come out of nowhere. They had a prelude in the 1960s. Martine contextualizes her book as an outgrowth of the transgender movement as well as her personal experience starting in the 1980s. Indeed, transgender studies as a clinical and academic field achieved breakthroughs during that decade—yet the transgender movement grew out of a social context that took shape twenty years earlier. 
 
Born as part of the last wave of the baby boom, in 1954, Martine was too young to experience the sixties in the same way that someone born just after World War II like me did. Yet the sixties were critical to the transgender awakening, and not only because transgender people participated with their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters at 1969’s civil rights-inspired Stonewell Rebellion in New York. 
 
Beyond clichés about “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” that decade raised consciousness about gender and sexuality in ways were a radical break with the first half of the twentieth century. The post-World War I Jazz Age had its buzz about flaming youth, companionate marriage, and something like a sexual revolution (later documented by Dr. Kinsey)—but it was a limited phenomenon both in numbers and in range of experience compared to the sixties. The New Left philosophical guru Herbert Marcuse had already laid the theoretical foundations for “The Love Generation” in his Eros and Civilization (1955) reinterpreting Freud, not as a practitioner of psychological adjustment, but as a critic of civilized repression and a prophet of sexual liberation. Norman O. Brown popularized the new consciousness in his celebration of “polymorphous perverse” sexuality in Love’s Body (1966). 
 
Despite or because of the well-publicized goings on at Woodstock in 1969, “The Love Generation” was not the sexual idyll often advertised. Marcuse recognized as much by warning against the joylessness of commercialized sexuality he called “repressive desublimination.” Indeed, one may wonder whether, not Brown’s Love’s Body, but Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) with its conventionally-gendered, sex-addicted antihero should be viewed as the real poster child for the sixties generation. 
 
But whether sixties sexual liberation was fulfilling or frustrating or both, it broke through the cake of convention and traditional stereotyped sex and gender roles in a decisive way. After Stokely Carmichael told women who asked to play a leadership role in the civil rights struggle that their “proper position in the movement is prone,” a new generation of feminists founded their own movement. Similarly, gays and lesbians discovered that “all politics is personal” and found their own voices.
 
Martin Duberman’s Stonewall ( 1993) grippingly documents the experience of “drag queens”—especially, those who were also people of color. Some had been catalysts of the protests against police repression yet were often treated as pariahs by those in the gay community they helped liberate. It was only a matter of time—and not much time—before a transsexual/transgender movement emerged to provide a shared context for the experience of people who, until that time, had either been ignored as invisible or treated as freaks, sometimes even by people of same-sex orientation. 
 
The Pre-1860s Background

“The feminist insistence upon seeing individuals as individuals, regardless of sexual biology, can now be carried to the next logical step: individuals are individuals, not sex types.”
 
The Apartheid of Sex is more than the record of the intellectual odyssey that accompanied Martine’s male-to-female transgender transformation. It can and should also be read as a testament to the philosophy of radical individualism (my term not hers) that Martine lives and breathes. Here, too, the sixties is part of the story in that the commune-building sentiment of the decade competed with an anti-collective libertarian impulse for the allegiance of radical young people. Crystallizing in the wake of that seminal period, Martine’s politics defies left-right pidgin holing, but she’s fundamentally a libertarian with a small “l” in that what matters to her is root-and-branch, across-the-board liberation of human potential including the potential for sexual experimentation and satisfaction. Though not an anarchist with a capital “A,” she puts an absolutely higher priority on self-realization by individuals than perfecting government institutions. 
 
The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that great thinkers are divided between “hedgehogs” who conceive of reality in terms of one big truth and “foxes” who see the world in terms of a multiplicity of particulars. Martine’s thinking combines a hedgehog-like grasp of big ideas with a fox-like instinct that what ultimately matters is each and every individual human being. 
 
Perhaps more than even she realizes, the original American historical context for Martine’s personal and political quest goes back beyond the 1960s to more than a century earlier. 
 
Around 1900, when conservative middle-class Americans wanted to express their horror at the specter of revolutionary subversion or radical immorality, the word they usually used was not “communist” but “anarchist”—and the associated image was that of long-haired, wild-eyed, Bohemian-minded, German immigrant bomb throwers like those who were blamed for Chicago’s Haymarket explosion in 1886. This involved an irony that was lost on those frightened Americans. The irony was that, before the Civil War, a homegrown American anarchism—basically nonviolent (except for sympathy with abolitionist John Brown), but philosophically and spiritually far-reaching—permeated the thinking of a whole generation of primarily New England Transcendentalist intellectuals including Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman (a New Yorker) as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott. Their radical individualism—a less provocative term than “anarchism” for this political creed—was written about and propounded from the lecture platform by Emerson while Thoreau famously acted it out in his nonviolent resistance to war (and nonpayment of taxes) at Walden Pond. Pioneering anarchist Joseph Warren, not directly part of the Transcendentalist circle, advanced the theory of “the sovereignty of the individual” elaborating Emersonian individualism as a radical political philosophy. 
 
However much it’s been downplayed by generations by strait-laced historians, Transcendentalists rejected conformity and convention in the name of liberating the self from all impediments. George Ripley’s Brook Farm was partly based on French socialist Charles Fourier’s doctrine of “attractive industry” according to which individuals, regardless of sex, were supposed to do the work for which they were most temperamentally fitted. Transcendentalist communal experiments sometimes questioned the reigning “cult of true womanhood” at least regarding traditional gender role differentiation in child rearing, though women still usually ended up doing most of the domestic chores. John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community experimented with replacing monogamy with “complex marriage” and “scientific procreation.” Margaret Fuller developed a theory of human personality defining every individual as “androgynous” with both male and female qualities. Lifelong celibate Thoreau nevertheless praised the sensuous Hindu soul as well as Whitman’s poetry. He offered this musing —“What the essential difference between man and woman is that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily answered”—that can be read in a very modern gender-liberated way. There’s was no ambiguity in Whitman’s rejection of “cold and sterile intellectuality” in favor of his unashamed personal and poetic erotic sensuality that literary critics, well into the twentieth century, refused to admit was rooted in his homosexual sensibility. “Looking west from California’s shore,” Whitman saw reflected back his American self. Managing an international biotech business in a globalizing age, Martine personifies a philosophy of life that’s also all-American. 
 
In pre-Civil War America, what we would call homoeroticism among both female “sisters” and male friends ran near the surface before it receded with the crystallization of the more sexually as well as socially regimented society of late nineteenth-century Victorian America. The firestorm of controversy surrounding recent attempts to historically out “the gay Lincoln” calls attention to this pre-Civil War sensibility. Respected sex researcher C. A. Tripp’sThe Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2005), published after the author’s death, convinced few professional historians that American’s most revered president was “predominately homosexual” in his sexual orientation. But it was not for lack of compelling circumstantial evidence (little of it new) compiled by Tripp that included emotionally effusive letters signed “yours forever” by Abe to his all-male coterie of friends, his sleeping for four years in the 1830s in the same double bed with Springfield merchant Joshua Speed, and his subsequent sharing a bed and night shirts at the Soldier’s Home(or “Lincoln Cottage”) three miles from the White House during the Civil War with presidential bodyguard, Pennsylvania “Bucktail” Captain David Derickson, when Lincoln’s wife, Mary, was out of town. 
 
Of course, then or now, intimacy was not synonymous with orgasm. The equally or more compelling evidence on the “heterosexual side” of the Lincoln equation includes Abe’s probable frequenting of prostitutes, as many as four women to whom he proposed, his siring of four sons with Mary Todd, and his close friend William Herndon’s observation that Lincoln was so oversexed that “he could scarcely keeping his hands off” women. 
 
No one will ever know for sure, and it’s tempting to speculate about Lincoln sexuality, though attempts to link his sexual orientation with his attitude toward slavery are probably a bridge too far. Was Lincoln devoutly heterosexual (the conventional view)? “predominately homosexual” (Tripp’s view)?bisexual (another interpretation)? or perhaps heterosexual with a strong homoerotic streak? If he had a pronounced homoerotic bent, it was no doubt nurtured by growing up in a log cabin culture in which same sex siblings often slept bundled up together and maturing in a frontier milieu where itinerant lawyers like Lincoln spent long periods away from their marital beds while often sharing tavern beds with their fellow traveling barristers. 
 
Just maybe, if The Rail Splitter were here today, he would scoff at such definitional quibbling because—being true to his own times—he would not accept straight-jacketing categories like “gay” or “straight” or even “bisexual” that were quite alien to that era’s mentality and sensibility.(The term “homosexual” was not invented until 1869.) In other words, Old Abe here today might even share Martine’s skepticism of such categories that still govern the thinking of most people my age or older. 
 
I go into this psycho-historical detail, not in order to titillate about Old Abe, but to suggest that history sometimes proceeds in cycles rather than straight lines. The breakdown of rigid gender hierarchies and sex roles that Martine argues is an accelerating trend of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may not be all that new. It may, in part, be a reversion to the significantly less structured, less regimented psycho-sexual world that prevailed before the Civil War. Back then, there was not yet a crystallized gay subculture (the closest thing to that may have been the hemaneh—half-man, half-woman—of the Cheyenne tribe); yet the sensibility we associate today the gay subculture may have resonated more widely during that era than it did later. 
 
Martine’s clarion call for a radically individuated sexual liberation—in which transgendered people ultimately exfoliate their own unique psycho-sexual selves without retreating into group identification with a supportive “third sex” community—may be so new just because it’s a throwback to something quite old. At the very least, it echoes the radical individualism of Whitman’s brave exploration of his own sensual frontier. It may even make Martine a spiritual descendant of that era’s greatest seeker of “a new birth of freedom”—Abraham Lincoln—America’s most beloved yet still most enigmatic president. 
 
Between Past and Future

“Sexual orientation in the third millennium will evolve toward a unisexual model because ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex types will fade away. Persons of any genitals will feel free to identify themselves as olive, magenta, coral, ebony, or white, or as femme, butch, tough, tender, or trans . With this continuum of sexual possibilities, gay, straight, and even bisexual will lose all meaning.” 
 
The present is, existentially, all we’ve got, yet—in an unsettling sense—the present is a fictive concept: just an ever-shifting dividing line between past and future. In the Afterword to The Apartheid of Sex, Martine reveals her true persona as a “transperson”—impatient to push us into the future by transcending the artificial, destructive barriers between races, sexes, and nations, and the even the mortality barrier that denies people indefinite life extension. Overcoming the obstacles to technological immortality is one of the goals of the Terasem Movement that she also leads.
 
For two decades, I’ve worked as a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance (MOT) in Los Angeles, which opened its doors in 1993. The early 1990s was a time when Los Angeles, rocked by both man-made disasters (the post-Rodney King Riot) and natural disasters (the Malibu Fires and Northridge Earthquake), was trying to rebuild bridges between communities as well as physical infrastructure. I was a professional historian of U.S. social and intellectual history with a special interest in the history of immigration and ethnic and race relations, especially Black-Jewish relations. Initially, I conceived my work designing historical exhibits for the MOT in terms of juxtaposed tracks between “intolerance” and “tolerance.” The “intolerance” track showed how certain kinds of people—racial minorities, immigrant newcomers, and women, and also poor men—were denied opportunity, while the contrasting “tolerance” track chronicled their struggles against oppression. 
 
This Manichean or dualistic view of the struggle between the change-oriented forces of good vs. the status quo-oriented forces of evil still is compelling, but in recent years I’ve become sensitive to goals of and reconciliation and transcendence that it mostly leaves out of the picture. Despite all of America’s current economic and security problems in a globalized twenty-first century, the evidence has been slowly mounting for decades that “transpersons” like Martine are really making a difference as intermarriage rates across all racial, ethnic, and religious divides soar and as young people, both the politically liberal and the politically conservative, increasingly gravitate toward support of gay rights and gay marriage initiatives that signalize race and gender attitudes in the country are moving in the direction championed by Martine. 
 
Following the publication of The Apartheid of Sex, Martin with her life partner or “spice” Bina Aspen Rothblatt, established the World Against Racism Foundation (WARF) to promote redemptive liberation across a broad front. She, her book, and her subsequent work have played an important role in sensitizing me and my work for the MOT to these exciting possibilities for the emergence from Homo sapiens of what she calls Persona creatas or “the creative person.” 
 
I hope the readers of this new online edition of The Apartheid of Sex will be challenged and inspired by Martine’s example to also become truly creative individuals. 
 
Selective Reading List
 
Amnesty International USA, Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in the U.S.  (New York:  Amnesty International USA, 2005)
 
Paul F. Boller, Jr., American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974)
 
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966)
 
Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1993)
 
Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left(New York: Knopf, 1979)
 
Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin Press, 1993)
 
Elliott Lewis, My Journeys in Multiracial America (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006)
 
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1955)
 
Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995)
 
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969)
 
Martine Rothblatt, Unzipped Genes: Taking Charge of Baby-Making in the New Millennium (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).
 
________, Your Life or Mine: How Geoethics Can Resolve the Conflicts between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation (London: Ashgate, 2004).
 
Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York: Dutton, 1997) 
 
Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008)
 
C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Free Press, 2005)

For this first part of my look a Jon & Kate plus 8 I am going to focus on the cosmetic plastic surgeries that have taken place within this husband and wife. I am going to look at the possibilities that these procedures affects on the relationship of the couple, their family and ultimately as we now know the downturn of their marriage.

Ok, back when this show started we were able to see into the life of a regular couple and how they were coping with raising eight kids. This was no easy feat and the mother, Kate, was a controlling mother. In her defense to those who do not like her, it’s hard to maintain order, organization and cleanliness in a house of only three kids, let alone eight. Give the woman a break for doing it with more kids and less money. She was a normal looking mom, frazzled in sweatpants and t-shirts with baby mess on her. Her hair was low maintenance and so was her make-up. Who can fault her with eight kids?

She showed us her stomach, which was nicknamed the ‘jowls of the dog’. I empathized with her and her sagging stomach riddled with stretch marks and never to look or be the same. I haven’t have six kids in my stomach but I knew what it felt like having had three and not being blessed with genes that prevented stretch marks. She was real and her stomach a testament to what she had been through. What mom out there in the same stomach boat as Kate and me wouldn’t want a tummy tuck to eradicate what Mother Nature did to us?

And then, somewhere out there a wife of a plastic surgeon saw the episode where Kate showed her stomach and thought she should do something. Actually, she thought her husband should, so they contacted Jon & Kate and offered her a tummy tuck, worth and estimated $5-7,000. As a viewer I was elated and jealous of Kate and her generous gift. Viewers watched the whole process through the series. However, something else happened after this surgery, something I don’t think that plastic surgeon’s wife, the show, Kate or her husband anticipated. Kate not only looked better, she felt better. With this newfound self-esteem Kate started to change.

Time went on and the bossing from Kate to her husband continued, only a little more forcefully with Jon. He kept nodding and doing what she said. The offers to make this couple better kept coming. On the show the couple was offered teeth whitening. They drink a lot of coffee to keep up with eight kids, again, who can blame them. So now Kate had whiter teeth to go with her great stomach.

Something else, Kate’s hair started to change, it was similar, but better. The cut was still easy to maintain, but now it had highlights and product in it most of the time. Kate started tanning to have that great glow. The sweat pants were replaced with an episode when they went to Banana Republic to buy Kate a new wardrobe.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have one spouse working and ten mouths to feed, but generally you don’t see people like that shopping at BR or having the time to go out tanning and keeping up their highlights. Kate wanted to look nicer since she could fit into clothes better again, without that excess skin from carrying six children. They were making more money off the show and had the excess cash to do all of this. Kate is not alone though, Jon was offered hair plugs and there was a whole show on that.

So, to recap, the family’s life was to be documented to show how it was to raise eight kids and through that notoriety the parents have become way better looking. The money that has come from the show has enabled this betterment of appearance and someone to be a personal assistant to Kate and watch the kids while Jon & Kate are away.

I’ve watched as this all was going on slowly growing more distant, until this summer when I heard about them separating. This was a couple that was, for what it appeared on the outside to be in a loving relationship. Tense at times, but loving, and most couples have these tense moments not in front of millions, so I will give them a little leniency. But going back to the transformation of Kate you can’t help notice that the better Kate looks, the more self-confident she gets. Of course you say, who doesn’t. However, lets look at it from another perspective, take out reality TV.

We have a homely mother who just gave birth to eight kids. She’s a normal for all intents-and-purposes mother. She’s not famous, she’s not known, she’s just someone who shops at Walmart. Her appearance is less than marketable from a procreation stand-point, with the stomach etc. She’s loved by her husband for giving up her body and self for the children. Now, you step in to this family’s lives and you give her a complete make-over and make her the woman she could have only dreamed to be before. You make her thin, sassy, fashionable, overall a desirable sexual commodity. Then you put her back in her house with her eight kids and walk away. She has great self-esteem, but isn’t it possible that with this newfound self-esteem and body she might think to herself, I’m hot! I can do better! People want me now! Even though, she’s still in the same life essentially as before.

Now, when you get this intense of a make-over and can hire someone to watch your kids instead of you being the stay-at-home mom, wouldn’t that change a person? Is it that unrealistic to see that they are splitting up? Jon has new hair, whiter teeth and new clothes, he’s marketable, and people want him. Kate has hair, teeth, skin, clothes and when she gets in the bedroom without the “jowls of the dog” it’s probably not as easy to see she laid in bed to give birth to six kids. She’s sexy, marketable and people want her too.

So I digress back to the cosmetic plastic surgery and the woman sitting at home watching the TV show, this woman whose husband was a plastic surgeon and turned to husband and said to do some good, help this poor mother of eight out and give her something that was taken away from her. I can imagine it being both a charity good deed and good PR for the husband’s company, but in the end were Jon & Kate ready for what it meant to their family?

I see this family as a glimpse further into the responsibilities that need to be taken with cosmetic plastic surgery. It makes you feel good, that’s great! I would love a tummy tuck too, but it’s about more than just wanting it. There are many other factors at play than a person and their surgeon. I think it’s time for the cosmetic surgery community and all those working in these types of vanity industries to take pause and think farther into the lives of the people they are affecting. Not just them though, there’s a responsibility even more on the people that choose to undergo procedures and to fully understand and appreciate what it is to alter their appearance, even if it is for the best, sometimes for the best of me isn’t enough.

A few days ago, I wrote an article implying that liberty in the U.S. may be at risk due to an ongoing state of near-war. I quoted Aldous Huxley: “Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

A commenter asked: “I wonder, however. Considering the rather draconian measures you believe would be required to control nanotechnology, do you think this is a bad thing?”

First, let me clarify (for any new readers) that “nanotechnology” here is used to mean molecular manufacturing—its original meaning—not all the newer stuff that has been grafted onto the word, such as nanoparticles. No one is suggesting that nanoparticles might need draconian control measures—though some kinds of nanoparticles might need a bit more control than they’re currently getting.

So, molecular manufacturing: tiny nanotech machines, made out of precisely designed molecules, that can rapidly build more machines of equivalent precision and complexity. A manufacturing revolution: general-purpose manufacturing, using non-scarce equipment, of inexpensive and highly advanced products. And the manufacturing systems could be small, easily concealed, easily duplicated—very difficult to control, if an unrestricted system was ever in civilian hands.

Pretty revolutionary—which means disruptive—which means potentially destructive. So, does it require draconian control measures?

There is some argument that it should simply be allowed to be developed with minimal controls, in the expectation that the good will outweigh the bad, and problems will be outweighed by solutions. In my more optimistic moments, I have a lot of sympathy for this viewpoint. Computers have developed pretty much that way, and we—and our infrastructure and society—have so far managed to survive computer viruses, spam, and data-mining. On the other hand, if a computer virus could kill a person instead of just erasing their data, we might be a lot less sanguine.

If molecular manufacturing has to be controlled, how much of society needs to be controlled to accomplish that? The good news is that not much broad-based control may be required. In other words, it may be sufficient to keep control of a few key technological capabilities, to make it difficult or impossible for a private effort to develop molecular manufacturing until technology has advanced to the point that molecular manufacturing is no longer a big deal.

There may, of course, be paths to molecular manufacturing that, once conceptualized, turn out to be fairly simple recipes, accessible with technologies that are already widespread. That would be problematic. But without sophisticated tools and lots of R&D money, such recipes couldn’t be developed and tested.

I’m not yet ready to say that broad-based control of society to avoid technological evils is definitely unnecessary and will always continue to be unnecessary. But I do think (at this moment, at least) that in terms of potential harm to humans from private development of high tech, there are other technologies that loom a lot larger. And I think this will continue to be the case until the first advanced molecular manufacturing system is not only developed, but released to the public in unrestricted form.

If it turns out to be necessary to restrict molecular manufacturing, then either limits on its development or technological limits on its implementation may well be sufficient. I don’t see the need to restructure or oppress society to keep us safe from this technology.

My ideal future would have most of the limits be technological, and applied to limit the use of publicly available manufacturing systems. Technological limits would have to be carefully designed, because almost anything can be cracked given enough effort. But molecular manufacturing has enough potential for good that I’d like to see it available in some form that’s appropriately restricted but still broadly useful.

A distinguished panel of guests, including IEET Managing Director Mike Treder, explain the benefits—and risks—of this powerful technology that could be here sooner than most expect.

Here are some excerpts from the full transcript:

Life in the Universe

I would like to speculate a little on the development of life in the universe and, in particular, the development of intelligent life. I shall take this to include the human race, even though much of its behaviour throughout history, has been pretty stupid and not calculated to aid the survival of the species. Two questions I shall discuss are, ‘What is the probability of life existing else where in the universe?’ and, ‘How may life develop in the future?’

It is a matter of common experience that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation can be elevated to the status of a law, the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe always increases with time. However, the Law refers only to the total amount of disorder. The order in one body can increase, provided that the amount of disorder in its surroundings increases by a greater amount. This is what happens in a living being. One can define Life to be an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, and can reproduce itself. That is, it can make similar, but independent, ordered systems. To do these things, the system must convert energy in some ordered form, like food, sunlight, or electric power, into disordered energy, in the form of heat. In this way, the system can satisfy the requirement that the total amount of disorder increases, while, at the same time, increasing the order in itself and its offspring.

A living being usually has two elements: a set of instructions that tell the system how to sustain and reproduce itself, and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. In biology, these two parts are called genes and metabolism. But it is worth emphasizing that there need be nothing biological about them. For example, a computer virus is a program that will make copies of itself in the memory of a computer, and will transfer itself to other computers. Thus it fits the definition of a living system that I have given. Like a biological virus, it is a rather degenerate form, because it contains only instructions or genes and doesn’t have any metabolism of its own. Instead, it reprograms the metabolism of the host computer, or cell. Some people have questioned whether viruses should count as life, because they are parasites and cannot exist independently of their hosts. But then most forms of life, ourselves included, are parasites in that they feed off and depend for their survival on other forms of life. I think computer viruses should count as life. Maybe it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image. . .

There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase of what might be called self-designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. There is a project now on to map the entire sequence of human DNA. It will cost a few billion dollars but that is chicken feed for a project of this importance. Once we have read the book of life, we will start writing in corrections. At first, these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts like aggression.

Laws will be passed against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won’t be able to resist the temptation to improve human characteristics such as size of memory, resistance to disease, and length of life. Once such super humans appear, there are going to be major political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete. Presumably, they will die out or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. . .

READ THE REST

Another effort in the ‘science has come to an end’ series recently appeared in the Guardian with Ehsan Masood’s article, “Are We Witnessing the End of Science?” Masood’s concern has more do to with how science is conducted today than a fear that the well has run dry—though he does suggest that ‘radical’ advances in physics and biology are likely at an end barring some kind of technological breakthrough (e.g. Hadron Collider data).

Specifically, Masood believes that we are seeing fewer revolutions in science because of the professional way in which modern science is organized. “It takes a lot of courage to challenge conventionally accepted views,” he writes, “and it needs a certain amount of stamina to constantly battle those who want to protect the status quo. Mavericks do not do well in large organisations, which is what some scientific fields have become.”

While there may be some truth to Masood’s assertion that there are systemic problems, the suggestion that such challenges will forever stifle potential scientific breakthroughs is overstated. These are merely short term problems. Science isn’t going to stop just because of the conservatism that’s supposedly embedded in the institutions that Masood is talking about.

As for the issue that scientific progress is at an end because there’s nothing left to uncover, that’s an equally problematic claim. This is a perspective that’s been promoted by such thinkers as John Horgan, author of the book, The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age.

While I agree that the rate of paradigmatic scientific breakthroughs is slowing down, I firmly believe that there’s still plenty of meaningful science to be done.

Accelerating technological change, decelerating scientific advance

A number of years ago Michael Vassar, who is now the President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and I tackled this question. We suspected that, despite the rapid pace of technological progress, that breakthroughs in science were actually slowing down. To test the theory we created a list of humanity’s most important scientific breakthroughs and noted how much time had elapsed since each development:

• Advent of religion as primitive metaphysics (100,000 to 45,000 years ago)
• Meditation Pantojoli, Forest Vedas (1000 BC)
• Advent of science in Ancient Greece (350 BC)
• Arabic Mathematics (800 AD)
• Revival of Ptolemaic Astronomy (early 1500s)
• Copernican Astronomy/Heliocentrism (1543)
• Advent of Mechanistic Dynamics (17th century)
• Statistics & Probability Bayes, Pascal, Fermat, etc. (17th century)
• Calculus Huygens, Newton & Leibniz (late 17th century)
• Newtonian Dynamics (1680s)
• Newtonian Optics (1680s)
• Idea of Progress/Enlightenment (18th century)
• Thermodynamics (early 19th century)
• Biochemistry (early 19th century)
• Non-Euclidean Geometry Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Gauss, Riemann, etc. (early 19th century)
• Electro-Magnetic Induction Faraday (1821)
• Natural Selection Darwin (1858)
• Geological Uniformitarianism (mid to late 19th century)
• Mendelian Inheritance (1866)
• Maxwell’s Equations (1884)
• Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements (mid to late 19th century)
• Microeconomics (mid to late 19th century)
• Germ Theory of Disease Pasteur (late 19th century)
• Advent of Speculative Science Fiction, Futurology (late 19th century)
• Unification of Chemistry and Physics (late 19th, early 20th century)
• Experimental Psychology (early 20th century)
• Undecidability (early 20th century)
• Einsteinian Relativity (1905)
• Quantum Physics (1909) Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger
• Universal Computing Turing, Gödel, Hilbert (1928)
• Advent of Cosmology (early to mid 20th century)
• Idea of force carrier Einstein, Bose, Higgs (mid 20th century)
• Standard Model of Particle Physics (mid to late 20th century)
• Neo-Darwinian synthesis with Mendelian Genetics Williams, Dawkins, etc. (mid to late 20th century)
• Chaos Theory or Complex Systems Theory (1960s)
• Memetics/Semiotics Dawkins, Eco (1970s)
• Sociobiology Wilson (1970s)

Based on this list we concluded that science had experienced a ‘golden age’ of sorts from the 17th through to the 19th century, and that major breakthroughs were becoming less and less frequent.

So what does that mean moving forward? As already mentioned, I suspect that the ‘earth shattering’ breakthroughs may be a thing of the past, though that cannot be guaranteed. Past successes may be no guarantee of future gain, but it can also be argued that the current slowdown is no guarantee that there won’t be future scientific black swans.

The ongoing interplay of science and technology

The interplay between science and technological progress is a very intimate one: some of the greatest breakthroughs in science arrived alongside the introduction of new technological devices.

Take modern astronomy, for example, which was ignited by the invention of the telescope. Similarly, microbiology’s emergence coincided with the introduction of the microscope. There are many other examples, including conceptual ones; it’s no coincidence that the human body started to be perceived as machine-like during the industrial revolution, or that the brain started to be seen as a type of computer once information technologies took off.

It’s quite possible that future advances will once again inspire the sciences. This will unlikely happen in the well-established or more traditional disciplines like astronomy, biology or chemistry. Instead, future breakthroughs will happen in the fuzzy and specialized areas that currently confound science.

The greatest beneficiary of such breakthroughs will undoubtedly be in neuroscience—or what some observers still regard as the ‘philosophy of mind’ on account of its slow progress. There is still plenty of mysterious space to work in to keep scientists busy for the foreseeable future (consciousness, qualia and subjectivity in particular). And very closely related to this is the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence theory. I very much anticipate that these two fields will inform and inspire each other over the coming decades.

Another important field will be quantum computation. This is actually a potential game-changer; quantum computers would likely change the way we go about information processing and perhaps even daily life itself. If theory holds, quantum computers will eventually reach the point of instantaneous problem-solving for almost all computational problems. That’s significant.

There’s also the issue of converging sciences. Take molecular nanotechnology, for example, which is a collision between chemistry, physics, biology and engineering (to name a few). We will undoubtedly uncover many mysteries of both physics (at small scales) and biology as we work to create molecular scale materials and devices.

Many of the fields I just described already exist today, but they’re arguably still proto-sciences that are in their first or second generation of development.

Technology is applied science

Science feeds technological development, which in turn inspires the sciences. But ultimately, all technologists are scientists. They just happen to apply their work to the real world. Without science, engineers are merely hopeful conjurers.

Which brings me to another reason that I am confident for future scientific breakthroughs: we still cannot create sufficiently accurate models of the world around us.

The human brain immediately comes to mind. If science is at an end, and we’ve discovered all there is to know, then why can’t we create an accurate and fully functional model of the human brain? And where the heck is our modern theory of consciousness?

The list goes on. What about the science of aging? How come we haven’t eradicated all diseases? Why do we still have cars that run on fossil fuels? How about addressing climate change? And what about a clean and sustainable energy source?

These are not technological problems—they are scientific problems. And they’re all tractable. Further, because there is a strong desire to solve such problems there’s is a good chance that we eventually will.

And as for science coming to an end, not by a long shot. We still live in a world of mystery and doubt. Yes, science has done an admirable job answering questions to date, but there’s still considerable work to be done.

Here is an introduction provided by the show’s producers:

Nanotechnology promises to change our world in ways that are difficult to predict, or even imagine.

Are you ready for…

• Star Trek style replicators that would allow you to make anything, ANYTHING, you wanted?
• Artificial robotic blood cells that will turn an Average Joe into a world-class athlete, or allow you to hold your breath under water for an hour at a time?
• Programmable “smart” matter than can take whatever form you want? It’s a suitcase. No, a bicycle! No, a TV! No, a puppy!

Nanotechnology promises all of this plus a lot more. We’re joined tonight by a distinguished panel of guests who will help us understand the benefits and risks of this technology that will be with us sooner than most of us expect.

J. Storrs Hall is a scientist, visionary, entrepreneur, and the president of the Foresight Institute.

Mike Treder, currently Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, co-founded the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology in 2002 and is one of the most popular and well-received professional speakers on nanotechnology.

Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is the co-founder and Vice President of Foresight Institute.

In addition to the nano-oriented questions above, our guests will be asked:

— What is the greatest transformation of our world that you have witnessed in your lifetime?
— What is the greatest transformation of our world that you expect to witness within your lifetime?

The show runs 90 minutes and broadcasts live on Tuesday evenings at 7:30 Pacific / 10:30 Eastern. Click here for more information.

I hope you can join us!

First, let me quote the main open source ecology wiki page:

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities." By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and "evolve to freedom."

Here is a quote from Edward’s post:

It is this sort of thinking which is required for a peaceful transition to a new era for our civilization. It will allow us to become resilient to the converging threats which face us from ecological destruction to market failure to terrorism. Global supply chains have shown themselves to be exceedingly vulnerable to these shocks. I hope we can overcome these by localizing production by utilizing global knowledge sharing so we can all enjoy the type of future some of the previous guest bloggers have been talking about. … I would like to see the technologies for food production to be as decentralized as possible. Whether that means vertical farms, community gardens, or single family gardens. I think what would make the most sense is to have cheap, mostly automated greenhouses with drip irrigation built into homes as standard practice.

But does it make any sense on a cold, rational level?


1. Will open source ecology allow people to feed themselves using only locally produced food and materials, without requiring everyone that give up their day job and without vastly reducing population densities?

Just how much land do you need to support one person by farming? This reference states that "Depending on climate, soil conditions, agricultural practices and the crop grown, it generally requires between 1,000 and 40,000 m² (0.25 and 10 acres) per person". The UK can thus probably support a population of about 10 million if we all do nothing but farm in our own little farmsteads. In support of this point, according the UK Census of 1801, the UK population was about 8.5 million, and according to another source it was about 4 million in 1600. So, before we developed modern agriculture, we were, in fact, limited to that figure of 50 people per square kilometre – note that 50 people per square kilometre times 250,000 square kilometres (the total area of the UK) is 12.5 million people.

Now, it is possible that in the very best of circumstances, using the best technology available today – hydroponics, fertilizer and artificial lighting, we might achieve the upper bound of 1000 people per square kilometre. But even this is not high enough. To feed all the people in a large city – for example London – using only the available land area of London, equates to feeding 5000 people using just 1 square kilometer. The usable area is of course even less. These people would have to be able to feed themselves by being farmers in their spare time, all using only locally produced tools and energy, without giving up their day jobs with an area the size of a large living room per person for growing crops, purifying water and recycling sewage. Excuse me if I deride this idea as total and utter nonsense, on a par with the beliefs of creationists, rather than being merely implausible.

2. Will open source ecology allow people to feed themselves using only locally produced food and materials, by making everyone into full-time subsistence farmers and dismantling cities so that population density is low?

In order for everyone to survive like this, the cities would have to be dismantled and the population spread evenly over the country – this is because the population in cities is much greater than 1000 people per square kilometer. This would, of course, completely disrupt the country for years and be massively expensive and unpopular. It is, however, plausible that many jobs could be done without cities – for example using telecommunications technology, but there are some jobs that really do require at least 100 people to be in the same place – for example an engineering company or a chip fabrication plant, an army barracks or military base, or a car factory. It is, however, not plausible that people could feed themselves through subsistence farming using only locally made materials, and only 1000 square meters of land whilst holding down a normal job. People have perhaps 1 hour of free time that they could spend doing manual labour per day – and if we look at the videos on the OSE site, we hear reports of “full days of backbreaking manual work” – and on the OSE factor-e-farm they use nonlocally produced fuel and a nonlocally produced engine for their tractor which does the hardest manual work for them. This shows that OSE high-tech subsistence agriculture is not an option that can be kept "on standby" in case of a problem - it is an all-or-nothing switch to a different, more local phase of society. And, of course this means that we have to consider it in a different light: not as a backup for modern society, but as an alternative. As such it has its own increased risks which I will mention later.

3. Will open-source ecology help save the human race from extinction? Will it make our society more resilient?

Given the above analysis - that we simply do not have enough land to live the "local" way, it is clear that open source ecology would not be able to save everyone. But it could certainly save some people - for example the survivors of a particularly bad nuclear war or bioterrorist pandemic. In fact, after such a war, people would probably spontaneously invent something like OSE due to the severe lack of food and the disruption of trade and transportation. So, on this count, OSE is a clear winner - a great fallback option for the "lucky" survivors. However, waiting for most people in the world to die is not exactly the ideal existential risk mitigation strategy; anyone who lives in a city would almost certainly end up dead in any scenario where OSE because useful..

4. Will open source ecology "free us from the necessity of wage labour", "make us freer"?

Now, in a sense, this claim is a little bit too vague to analyze. The implication seems to be that we will have more free time, or that we will spend less time working. Perhaps one could interpret it to mean that we will live in a moneyless society, and we won’t have to work to make money any more. Unfortunately, both of these claims are false. Firstly, how much free time you have for a given standard of living is a function of how rich your society is, i.e the GDP per capita. In the UK, this value is high, so life is relatively good. What would happen if we implemented open source ecology? Would we get richer? No! Because of economies of scale, making production more local makes everything more expensive. Fundamentally, our civilization works because of economies of scale. Adam smith discovered this in his seminal work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; Smith realized that by specializing to produce just one thing, you can produce that thing more cheaply. A lot more cheaply, in fact. Now, since our present high wealth is powered by super-massively large economies of scale, reducing the scale to the farmstead level will decrease our wealth. We will not be able to afford such luxuries as healthcare, education, going to university, meeting more than a small group of people, using computers, travelling around the world, going to art galleries, watching movies, making art, having specialists who make scientific discoveries, etc. We will instead have to spend our time tending the crops or repairing the home-made tractor.


5. Will open source ecology will be good for the environment?

Well, getting rid of 90% of the world’s population would undoubtedly be good for the environment. Fewer people means less environmental footprint, but it strikes the author that this is not a politically viable option in the near-term. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a small number of people take up the open source ecology movement, utilizing a small amount of land that is not really being used at the moment anyway. Will this be good for the environment? Perhaps, though the effect will be insignificant, since the number of people involved would be small.

6. Will OSE protect us from terrorists?

As I have already argued, local living would mean disbanding or vastly reducing the army and the government (as well as pretty much everything else except farmers!). Any larger than average group that decided to arm itself would be able to "gobble up" adjacent groups through military conflict, kill the men and rape the women (humans have done this kind of thing throughout history, and it seems to have been the dominant mechanism which caused large societies to replace small ones). It is only by having the most efficient possible farming techniques that leave a large segment of the population free from the need to farm for food that countries such as the UK and the USA are able to achieve the kind of military dominance we have, by having specialists in fighting, weapons development and espionage. So, although OSE would protect us against terrorists attacking central infrastructure such as power plants or tall buildings, it would leave us wide open to something much, much worse: open military conquest and war crimes by anyone who decided that conquest was more important than local living.

7. Will highly advanced technology make Open Source Ecology work?

With the development of advanced nanotechnology, and robotics (possibly nanorobotics) we are likely to see products and materials with superlative performance that would allow a person to very easily produce enough food to feed themselves in a very small area of land.. But don’t hold your breath: such technology will probably arrive around 2050-2100, and even then if your nanoreplicator or farming robot broke down, you would not be able to fix it using locally made tools. So ultra high-tech local subsistence farming is not actually resilient – using high-technology solutions makes you more reliant upon centralized facilities to supply and repair such devices.

8. So what is OSE good for at the moment?

Well, it seems like a natural fallback if the worst does happen. In brighter times - such as those of today - it is a great hobby, rather like having an allotment, a metalworking hobby and a home-science hobby all rolled into one. It also seems to foster a sense of community and social capital, though at the cost of the people involved being somewhat deluded about the significance of what they’re doing. Open source ecology is ultimately a hobby movement, and does not stand a serious chance of changing the world for the better in a big way. Though, on the other hand, it is one of the best hobbies I have ever seen, because it contributes to people having a better understanding of how practical things work, to working together with their community as a team, and to people getting both physically and mentally fit.

9. Why have otherwise very intelligent people been sucked in by the OSE’s false claims?

It looks to me like OSE is an example of the worst possible human cognitive bias – motivated cognition. This is what happens when you become emotionally attached to an idea – in this case “decentralization as the solution to all our problems” - and then you start actively looking for arguments in support of it and actively looking for ways to dismiss any arguments against it. As you become more enamoured with the idea, you start to associate all good things with it and disassociate all bad things from it. The proponents of OSE didn’t even say one bad thing about OSE on their website, but they associated every positive thing they could think of with it – it will make us freer, richer, help the environment, free us from the drudgery of work, protect us from terrorists, they even claimed that it could lead to an end to all wars and human conflicts. Motivated cognition is a systematic failure mode of the human mind which everyone is highly susceptible to unless they take active steps to prevent it, known as rationality training. You can find out more about this by looking at LessWrong.com, or the Wikipedia article on cognitive biases.  ]]> 2009-07-07T15:50:46+00:00 director@ieet.org (IEET)http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/mijic20090707/#When:15:50:46Z http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthicalTechnology/~3/kTVAztRit9k/ http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/treder20090706/#When:21:00:59Z Barack Obama is in Moscow this week, holding talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and—perhaps more importantly—with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is regarded by many as still holding the crucial keys of power inside that nation’s opaque political structure. In any case, the leaders are discussing, among other things, nuclear disarmament. Between them, Russia and the United States possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads. And so, any negotiations that can lower those numbers significantly can only be viewed as positive.