Knowledge is Power? : Genetic Enhancement, Cognitive Capitalism, and the Future of Educational Equality
What will it mean for Americans to share a commitment to the value of educational equality as forms of genetic enhancement emerge? Will our cultural pledge to create conditions in which each individual can achieve their full potential — already compromised as it is by classism and racism — become further strained by the manifestation of gene editing technologies on a global scale?
These are far-reaching questions that should be explored sooner as opposed to later. Based on the results of two recent surveys by Pew Research, their importance may not seem initially apparent, but scratch a little below the surface and their flash point becomes a matter of relative immediacy. The surveys, which concern global [i] and American [ii] views on biotechnological research, each report a generally negative view on the use of gene editing technologies to make a baby more intelligent (America — 80 %; globally — a 20-public median of 82 %). In short, there is a clear overall perception that this would be a “misuse of technology” and “taking the technology too far.” In the American study, this specific view holds firm regardless of the respondents’ varying levels of science knowledge, although those with high science knowledge were more inclined to see gene editing techniques as appropriate overall (e.g. to treat a serious disease/ condition at birth or to reduce the risk of one over the baby’s lifetime). About half of Americans (52%) report a belief that within the next fifty years, it is likely that gene editing technologies will be able “to eliminate almost all birth defects by manipulating the genes of an embryo before a baby is born.” The majority of respondents in the American survey, however, also anticipate that the widespread use of such technologies will have more negative than positive effects on society, with 58% reporting concerns that it will lead to increased social inequality and only two in ten Americans saying it’s very likely that these developments will benefit society as a whole.
The global study, whose national survey populations were selected on the factor of their sizable growing investments in science and technology, was based upon face-to-face and telephone interviews in Europe, North America, the Asia-Pacific region, India, Brazil, and Russia. It is here that a few striking results emerge when it comes to the “complex and contextual nature of public attitudes” regarding specific instances of gene editing. Returning to the question of whether it is an appropriate use of biotechnology to change a baby’s genetics to make it more intelligent, despite the respondents’ overall negative perception (a 20-public median of 14%), 64% of India’s respondents view this as an appropriate use of gene editing. While India stands out as more positive about gene-editing research overall, with a majority of adults viewing research on gene editing as appropriate (and both Hindus and Muslims being equally likely to report this view), this population’s positive response to the particular issue of cognitive enhancement is noteworthy and prompts questions of an anthropological nature about the deeper diversity of culturally embedded perspectives that may exist around the globe about what counts as intelligence, the range of conditions (biotechnological, sociocultural, legal) under which its development is sanctioned, and what it means to educate well in different societies.
In America and the Western world more broadly, the culture of education, its institutional structure, and our notion of ourselves as liberal, autonomous, and knowing subjects remains strongly influenced by Enlightenment philosophies. We tend to dualistically think of education as a pursuit that belongs to the realm of the mind (rather than the body) and culture (rather than nature or the biological). And yes, while we primarily envision it as an activity that unfolds in classrooms and revolves around the formal learning of curriculum, we also are aware that schools, along with parents and family, are agents of socialization — that they introduce us to values (e.g. teamwork, competition, civic responsibility) that will be repeatedly reinforced to us throughout our lifetimes. Of course, educational expectations vary from culture to culture, class to class, and family to family, so in multicultural democracies, the extent to which the latent messaging of scholastic institutions (e.g. “Math is more important than art class”; “You should go to college”) coheres with specific parental expectations remains mutable.
Also, American perspectives on educational achievement, albeit nuanced by a growing collective awareness of sociological factors such as the massively unequal distribution of wealth, cultural capital, and other social privileges, remain rooted in what the philosopher Michael Sandel [iii] calls the “meritocratic faith”:
We want to believe that success […] is something we earn, not something we inherit. Natural gifts, and the inspiration they inspire, embarrass the meritocratic faith; they cast doubt on the conviction that praise and rewards flow from effort alone. In the face of this embarrassment, we inflate the moral significance of effort and striving, and depreciate giftedness.
In fact, neither the sociological nor the meritocratic faith pay much heed to innate aptitudes,[iv] a lapse for which the consequences become more problematic when we cast an eye towards emerging genetic enhancements. What might happen if these “faiths” and our dualistic thinking about education, intrinsic as they are to the American scholastic sphere, are thrown into question? Or when on a global scale, we acknowledge that these are perspectives and modes of interpretation that simply don’t bear as much relevance in other societies — something that is likely to be highly salient as gene editing technologies roll out?
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, the author of the recently released On Transhumanism,[v] previews these questions by arguing that education and genetic enhancement are analogous processes and should be morally evaluated as such as part of a broader transhumanist approach that is affirmative of biotechnological progress and societies where the greatest plurality of idiosyncratic lifestyles can be realized.[vi] Elsewhere[vii] Sorgner explains that in a nutshell, parental education and genetic enhancement can be viewed as parallel processes because in both cases:
- Decisions are being made by parents concerning the development of their child at a stage when the child cannot yet make an informed choice,
- Choices are being made on the basis of the parents’ life experience, even though the precise outcomes are always unknown,
- Parents make decisions out of love and concern for their child’s life chances (i.e. they want their child to have the best possible starting points in life),
- And parental influences most often lead to better outcomes than those that would arise without any guidance or by chance
Sorgner elaborates on the implausibility of the mind (education)/body (enhancement) separation by dismantling many of the arguments against genetic enhancement put forth by the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas.[viii] Key among these is Habermas’s view that the cultural skills one learns through education are reversible while the biological changes one acquires through genetic enhancement are irreversible. For example, Sorgner raises the point that psychiatric illnesses that arise from traumatic events in one’s early childhood, albeit not through intentional educational means, can become chronic and lead to permanent personality disturbances.[ix] Moreover, can one “unlearn” acquired abilities like tying one’s shoes or speaking a mother tongue? Based upon empirical data from research involving siRNA therapy (gene silencing),[x] Sorgner adds that “it is plausible to claim that theoretically […] genetic states are not necessarily immutable.” Epigenetics, which is concerned with the influence of behavioral and environmental factors on gene activity, is an area of research that Sorgner also cites as being supportive of the dissolution of a categorical distinction between genetic and environmental influences.
The point of disagreement between Habermas and Sorgner that is perhaps of broadest relevance to our leading question — how genetic enhancement may test America’s commitment to educational equality in a competitive global economy– deals with instrumentalization, or when one person uses another person as a means to an end. Habermas is concerned that genetic enhancement will entail a child’s instrumentalization by their parent — something he regards as an immoral act.
Ironically, one of the major dialectical counterpoints that could be cited against the expansion of access to higher education in America (e.g. via Biden’s American Families Plan[xi]) is that its denizens are de facto instrumentalized in the service of neoliberal universities, the nation-state, and their success in a global capitalist market. The comedian Bill Maher recently took this perspective during the “New Rule” segment of his June 3rd, 2021 Real Time show when he declared college and pricey postgraduate certifications to be a “scam,” a “grift,” and a “racket” that sells Americans “a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class.”[xii]
Interestingly, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche[xiii] expressed similar concerns about the expansion of education in the rapidly modernizing social landscape of 19th century Germany. His main problem was not that more people shouldn’t receive a public education (notwithstanding Nietzsche’s intricate relationship with the concept of equality), but that he was doubtful that the Prussian state could be trusted to regulate an educational system that facilitated anything other than young people’s utilization towards the fulfillment of its immediate political and economic needs. So too for faculty. In Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator, he describes the intelligentsia of the day as being equally mobilized by the state according to an instrumental rationality. In Nietzsche’s view, the rapid modernization occurring within Germany at the fin de siècle brought with it an assault against human creativity, privacy, leisure, and contemplativeness.
The system is changing however. The industrial capitalism of Nietzsche’s time, which was based upon the accumulation of physical capital and the driving role of the factory in the mass production of standardized goods, is now being replaced by a new model, in which knowledge is the primary object of accumulation and basic source of value, and its dissemination is the driving role of the economy. Coined “cognitive capitalism”[xiv] by the French economist Yann Moulier Boutang, this economic theory involves a different type of exploitation. Cognitive capitalism exploits the inventive force of active networks of brains operating in tandem with computers. Such “beyond human” activity never ceases and has creative phases that are unpredictable and cannot be consigned to a particular time or place.
Moulier Boutang illustrates the polycentric nature of cognitive capitalism’s exploitation by invoking the metaphor of honeybees. In “A Manifesto for the Pollen Society,” he explains that while the ruling class of contemporary knowledge society has figured out how to capture the productive labor of its worker bees when they make honey, its current aim is to better extract their efforts at “pollination” — the connective, creative, autonomous, and responsive activities upon which the production of information blossoms. Cognitive capitalism therefore thrives on spatial and institutional forms that allow for knowledge to be captured from modes other than traditional wage labor. “What a company is worth is now determined outside of its walls” and “outside the scope of the classic working day,”[xv] so we simply cannot persist in thinking that this new capitalism is only interested in the honey of the bees — a relic of academic Marxism that he regards as showing a “worrying backwardness” in an era of biotechnology.[xvi] In a knowledge society that thrives upon the decentralized exploitation of the positive externalities –the unofficial fruits — produced by the collective creative intelligence of beyond human networks, universities and their offshoots (e.g. research laboratories and non-profits) carry “the same intensity and importance as big businesses.”[xvii]
If, as Moulier Boutang argues, knowledge is a game running on the capitalist motivations of libido sciendi (a “desire to learn”) and libido dominandi (a “desire to dominate”),[xviii] then the notion that scientia potentia est (“knowledge is power”) seemingly comes with some significant strings attached. For social scientists, it necessarily triggers a shift away from the prevailing impression that intelligence and academic achievement are solely individual entities and recontextualizes these discussions in a more collective direction.
What will it mean to safeguard educational equality within the upcoming global cultural context of genetic enhancement? What will it mean to educate well when the primary source of extraction in a cognitive capitalist world is the knowledge created in not only human — but beyond human — networks of innovation? It is inevitable that social science discourses about capitalist exploitation and instrumentalization will need to consider these questions.
Within this reformulation, might education, intelligence, and academic achievement be approached more as nomadic processes and less as individualistic acquisitions?
Only time will tell.
Cited Sources
[i] Cary Funk, Alec Tyson, Brian Kennedy, and Courtney Johnson. 2020. “Biotechnology Research Viewed With Caution Globally, but Most Support Gene Editing for Babies To Treat Disease.” Pew Research Center.<https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/12/10/biotechnology-research-viewed-with-caution-globally-but-most-support-gene-editing-for-babies-to-treat-disease/>
[ii] Cary Funk and Meg Hefferon. 2018. “Public Views of Gene Editing for Babies Depend on How It Would Be Used.” Pew Research Center. <https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/07/26/public-views-of-gene-editing-for-babies-depend-on-how-it-would-be-used/>
[iii] Michael Sandel. 2007. The Case Against Perfection. Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pg. 28.
[iv] Mark E. Jonas and Douglas W. Yacek. 2019. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Education: Rethinking Ethics, Equality and the Good Life in a Democratic Age. London: Routledge.
[v] Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. 2021. On Transhumanism. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
[vi] Roberto Manzocco. 2021. “Interview: Stefan Lorenz Sorgner.” Philosophy Now. <https://philosophynow.org/issues/142/Stefan_Lorenz_Sorgner>
[vii] Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. 2015. “The Future of Education: Genetic Enhancement and Metahumanities.” The Journal of Evolution & Technology. 25 (1): 31–48.
[viii] Jürgen Habermas. 2001. Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
[ix] Sorgner 2015, pg. 36.
[x] Erwai Song et al. 2003. “RNA interference targeting Fas protects mice from fulminant hepatitis.” Nature Medicine. 9: 347–51
K.V. Morris et al. 2004. “Small interfering RNA-induced transcriptional gene silencing in human cells.” Science. 305 (5688): 1289–1292.
[xi] 2021. American Families Plan. < https://www.whitehouse.gov/american-families-plan/>
[xii]Real Time with Bill Maher. 2021. “New Rule: The College Scam.” 4 June 2021. YouTube.< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x5SeXNabd8>
[xiii] Friedrich Nietzsche. 2004. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Translated by M.W. Grenke. South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press.
[xiv] Yann Moulier Boutang. 2011. Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
[xv] Ibid, 164.
[xvi] Ibid, 165.
[xvii] Ibid, 151.
[xviii] Ibid, 76.
