Why Not? And So What?
David Blankenhorn
The Herald Examiner | September 1998

It seems important, at least to the editors of the New York Times, for us to know that Professor Lawrence Tribe of the Harvard Law School is having "second thoughts" regarding the prohibition of human cloning. Several years ago, he "leaned toward prohibition as the safest course." But today he is "inclined" to say: "Not so fast."

Why the change? Tribe is reluctant to endorse legal or social distinctions based on beliefs about what is "natural." Such beliefs, he worries, are "vague." They are also intertwined with tradition and conventional morality. Some of them are even connected to religion. In addition, the notion that some institutions and practices are naturally suited to humans - that they properly fit who we are - can lead to the stigmatizing of institutions and practices that are deemed unnatural. In the unenlightened old days. Tribe reminds us, we used to do this all the time: "One need only think of the long struggle to overcome the stigma of 'illegitimacy' for the children of unmarried parents."

Finally, a society that endorses some things as "natural" will "risk cutting itself off from vital experimentation," including lifestyle experimentation.

To me, this argument flows inevitably from Tribe's unstated but implicit definition of the human person. For Tribe, we humans (at least in the U.S.) are what John Rawls calls "self-originating sources of valid claims.” We are autonomous units of desires, rights, and legitimate values of our own choosing. Each of us is called to shape his own teleology.

Any larger notion of what it means to be a human – any understanding of "natural" that extends beyond this little unencumbered self - is consigned by Tribe to the dustbin of vagueness, tradition, religion, and (what for Tribe is pretty much the same thing) bigotry. Tribe does not explicitly spell out this definition. But without the support of this understanding of who we are, Tribe's "second thoughts" would be unsustainable.

For the modern person of Western civilization at the end of this century, there are only two creation stories. One story takes place in the Garden of Eden, as told in the Book of Genesis. The other takes place in the State of Nature as told by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and the other eighteenth-century philosophers of the Enlightenment and creators of Anglo-American liberalism.

In one story, humans are God's children, created in God's likeness and image, and called by God into special relationships with one another and into a covenant with God. In this accounting of who we are, humans are free to seek and understand the truth about themselves, and even free to reject the truth, but they are not free - here I believe is the meaning of the forbidden fruit - to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil, since the power to make the moral law is God's alone.

In the other story, humans leave the state of nature (where life is cruel and short) and contract with one another to create civilization. They do so because they choose to do so and because it is in their interest to do so. In this accounting, there is no natural human teleology and there is no forbidden fruit. In one story, the very idea of human cloning is repugnant. In the other, simply to ask the basic question - "Why not?" - is to know that the eventual answer will be: "Yes, let's do it. We can eat of that tree."

In 1995, Midge Dector made so bold as to sum up our entire cultural predicament - and indeed, the overall trajectory of Western culture in this century - by pointing out modernity's primary cultural questions: "Why not?" and "So what?"  

"Why not?" is the question of early and high-tide modernity. It's an optimistic question. It aims to quarrel about limits, extend frontiers, push through previously respected boundaries. As Jim Morrison of The Doors famously put it: Break on through to the other side. It's a liberating question that can unleash much societal dynamism, some of it quite valuable. It's a question that seeks to shift the burden of proof. Is the concern divorce or unwed childbearing? Selling human eggs? Same-sex marriage? Prove that it's harmful. It's also a question that relentlessly challenges the validity of absolute judgments. Pornography? Define your terms. Cloning? Surely you admit that the issue is complicated. Forbidden fruit? Surely there are some cases, under some conditions.

"So what?" is the decadent child of "Why not?", perhaps the final answer to "Why not?", emerging most vividly in late modernity, or as part of what is sometimes called (mistakenly in my view) post-modernism. It's a profoundly pessimistic question, bragging about its cynicism while heading toward despair. It’s a question not for the rebel or the skeptic, but for the nihilist. lt does not seek to expand limits; it denies the presence of limits. It does not seek to argue for new truth, but instead suggests that truth itself, especially, when posited as objective truth, is a meaningless idea. Why "get so worked up? It doesn't really matter. Big deal. Who cares? So what?

In this moment of national reckoning regarding the sex allegation controversy surrounding President Clinton, many people, I believe properly, have questioned some of the inquisitors, cautioned those who would judge the president too quickly or harshly. Let the facts come out. 

And yet, in some of the commentary and public reaction, another point of view has also emerged, strongly and unmistakably. That point of view is: So what? Adultery? As long as the guy does his job, who cares about his sex life? Weren't they consenting adults? Lying? Don't they all lie? Nixon did. Kennedy did. So what?

To me, this is terribly sad. "So what?" does not redirect our search for moral truth. It declares that the search itself is purposeless. When all or at least most of the important facts in this matter are known, and we as a society move toward a considered public judgment, I cannot believe that most of us, or even many of us, will essentially be saying. So what? Surely there are better angels in our nature.

The author is president of the Institute for American Values, 1841 Broadway, Suite 211, New York, NY 10023-7603. Excerpted, with the author's permission, from Propositions, the Institute's newsletter.