4 Questions for Marianne del Cerriota

Marianne del Cerriota, M.D. is a senior fellow at the Kassel Institute for Bio-Economic Policy, a think-tank in San Diego. del Cerriota is a respected authority on bioeconomics issues at the frontier of medicine and technology, most notably generative medicine and semantic bio-diagnostic research. Author or editor of 14 books as well as a chapbook of “anti-sonnets,” del Cerriota served as an advisor to surgeons general under the Carter, Bush I, and Clinton administrations. Her latest book Not Now (Grove Press), paints a bleak picture of human behaviors in the face of rapid scientific encroachment on intellectual and psychological territory. She responded to these queries Jan. 26-29, 2009; some are edited for length and clarity.

SU: Not Now was published last month, so I’m guessing it was completed by mid-2008 or thereabouts. Has the turmoil in the western financial system in the last six months got you wishing you could make some adjustments to the book?

MdC: You seem to be implying that I might now want to paint a less optimistic picture of the future, which would hardly be possible. I would not change a line in my book, nevertheless. We are headed toward catastrophe, inevitably. Mainstream news outlets are serving the same narcotics, using innocuous terms like “meltdown” and even “disaster” to describe the so-called financial crisis. Disaster is what happened yesterday, while any thinking person understands that recovery is, in the absence of some miracle, literally impossible. I described the unfolding disaster in my book as being like the peeling of an onion where each new layer’s rottenness had been obscured by the last’s. No, I believe my book to be still well ahead of the curve.

Your book’s title refers to emergent scientific breakthroughs which will be thwarted by, to use your phrase, a “bioeconomic catastrophe.” Can you explain the process by which global economic events constrict science at precisely the wrong times?

The first thing to understand, before moving to that induction, is the significance of the extent to which people seem to misunderstand our current problem. Because of my own reluctance to believe in our ability to escape catastrophe, it’s become clear to me that denial is uniquely qualified as a collective survival tactic. Nevertheless, when the world’s wealth falls by 50%, as I believe it will, certain statistical inevitabilities start to trigger. Local governments will be bankrupt and their offices plundered. The capitol will be besieged. Soldiers will desert in the thousands. Every person with a college degree will start to sound like Marx, talking about means of production and natural resources and labor instead of about money. The entire world will essentially seem to consist of unskilled graduate literature students and revolutionary gangs.

In the meantime, anti-natalogists, eugenicists, bioethicists, pre-natal genomic cartographers and the like are threatening to eradicate all institutional (and personal—including at the cellular level) capital systems. The result won’t be that information will replace agriculture or cars or even commodities as capital—it’s not even that meta-information will. Instead, new developments will make it clear that capital exchanges as such have run their course, in favor of a more sublime rendering of the human stamp. However, the 1^st gen technology threatens to prevent the move to 2^nd gen.—which is a classic law of biological order. What is unnatural, in this case, is the extent to which a revolutionary Darwinian leap has been predicted—by myself and others. So few are aware for two reasons: the science is difficult and the science is scary.

This confluence of circumstances brings us to the precipice of a huge bioeconomic chasm that begs for new ideas—it demands that we start jumping off cliffs and then hoping, with no good reason, that we’ll land somewhere. This sort of thinking becomes even more difficult during high-pressure times.

But hasn’t cutting-edge science itself begotten the very problems that threaten it?

For the most part, yes; and this continues to trouble me. It’s frustrating to be so distracted by a 19^th century problem, but Frankenstein still walks the earth. If however, this cutting-edge science leads to…Let me put it this way, there will be a liberating aspect to the eradication of the disposition for the empirical. Engaging in empiricism, of course, is to practice the most basic bio-economic activity, and to do so in the most traditional sense. Rejecting this approach is what will allow us to account for, for example, Zeno’s paradox, or bust through Moore’s law, or accomplish any of our other scientific goals. This demands re-investment in radical ideas, which have for so long suffered under the curse of marginalization. Pressure may bring these ideas forward, or it may not.

I know this is old-thinking, but the average citizen may be investigating a plan to convert all his wealth to cash or even gold. Are such activities outright absurd, in your view?

I wouldn’t criticize or ridicule anyone for attempting to build their ark. The time horizon on bioeconomic shifts is unknowable. At this point, it’s all gambling. I have nothing to hide. In the near term, I’m betting on cash, which is to me not a conservative but a radical strategy. The conservative strategy is to find a way to collect and store potable water.

 

Teaching in America, Where Your Opinion Counts

Thesis (not a straw man, even if it seems so at first)

My students write several expository essays each semester and always ask, a few days before the first paper’s due, where would be a good place for them to put their opinions. I usually say it’d be a good idea to leave them right where they are, i.e. in their heads and off the page, because in this class I don’t care about their opinions, not one lick. This generates uncomfortable laughter and then combative questions as to how they’re supposed to make an argument or assess an argument without putting their opinions right there in the paper.

Displaying the steely fatalism most teachers learn to know too well, I pleasantly ask them to turn to the class notes they took on day #2 and read the definitions of claim (“an arguable assertion” – my department’s definition) and opinion (“a belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by proof” – The American Heritage Dictionary’s) and give examples of each.

They talk for a while.

Then I talk. I say again what I’ve already said: that in lay life, opinions matter because someone might care whether you believe, for example, that chocolate ice cream is delicious. But in here (motioning toward the floor of my own classroom) and out there (stabbing wildly toward the door to indicate the rest of campus), I say, the interest is in claims, not opinions. Claims we can discuss and argue about—that’s what we’re after. Opinions are unassailable and flit about unburdened by the obligations of argument. They’re insubstantial. Not worth our time. Save your opinions for your pitiful social networking blogs, I scowl, not quite old enough yet to play the cranky old professor, but trying.

Then I really let loose with a crankpot speech full of bluster and self-congratulation. Viz: Opinions are the nuclear weaponry of the uninformed and the uneducated and the furtive elephants, invisible only to the willfully blind, hidden in plain sight in our rhetoric and writing classroom: destructive, powerful, and all too real. Their mere existence can undermine all the pedagogy of peace time.

Gaining some momentum, I elect to widen my critique and roundly condemn basically everyone: The reasons that compel you students to put opinions in your papers are the same ones that compel many people to vote. You’re just banging away at your freedom button, which every American has installed somewhere in the area of his left breast. Having an opinion is liberating; it’s an affirmation of freedom. And we Americans love freedom. I myself, qua American, have a nice strong cup of freedom every chance I get; then I comment on whether that particular cup of freedom was, in my opinion, better or worse than the last one I had.

Then I figure I might as well finish up with a marriage of my clever metaphors: Democracy, is essentially mob rule, which ensures nuclear annihilation, sooner or later. This is why my classroom is an opinion-free autocracy—it’s safer for all involved, and no one gets drunk.

Antithesis (using a personal example)

I’m the proud owner of two famous (in certain circles) opinions that I’m happy to discuss with you now or at any other mutually convenient time. I believe these to be true but I can never prove them—nor do I have any desire to, because they’re already true. Here you go:

1. Tom Hanks is the worst actor of our, or any, generation.
   
2. Me and four of my college buddies could easily handle the women’s basketball NCAA national champion in a basketball game, indoors or out, half court or whole, under the lights or in plain view of the noon sun. None of us played basketball beyond high school, we’re all 6′ or shorter and we were not in fantastic physical condition when this was first proclaimed (in April 1997), nor are we now.
   

As for #1: Tom Hanks, pace the film academy and seemingly everyone else I’ve ever met, is a talentless hack. I wish him no harm, but folks should know the truth.

#2: People sometimes take special interest in that second claim, especially women, and I may even grant them, if I’m in a generous and idle-discussion-prone mood, that the “opinion” is at base sexist and sexist in an almost hostile and creepy way. But even so, I’d like to make clear here, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I tend to get hostile and combative while defending these curious opinions (curious, by the way, doesn’t mean untrue). I pay close attention to the looks people give me while discussing them (it’s starting to sound as if I have a problem—and I do. I’m really daring people to disagree so I can affirm my own ability to disagree with them in a very undemocratic and irrational way, which is my prerogative, again, as an American, for whom more than just blood has been spilled defending my ability to act in this manner, even if it is irresponsible), and I notice the grandfatherly “you’ll come around,” the freaked out “Let’s change the subject,” and the solemn head nodding in somber agreement (full disclosure: this last is usually by one of my four buddies from college).

I’ve never written these opinions down on paper before. It feels good to affirm them in writing; it was fun to do.

But here I am going back and looking at them and reading them, and I’m starting to wonder. Are the “or any” and the “easily handle” going just a bit too far?

Wait a second…

I’ll just end this section right now.

Synthesis

More helpful advice to students, upon further consideration, when it comes to argumentative writing: Better to have opined and failed than never to have opined at all. For them, I mean this literally. This is good advice for everyone. At the very least, we will have a record of our quiddities.

 

Stuck

A man and a woman, a guy and a gal, a gentleman and a dame—they enter a room. A few months later, they go to leave and discover the woman can’t fit through the door.

I get you. Preggers. Alea iacta est.

A snake enters a mouse den–

–do they call them den’s?

Your snake scarfs down a mouse and decides to digest somewhere else.

He can’t fit out?

Your snake can fit out part way, so just his neck is showing. He looks about like a third of a snake now, in that hole.

An ill-advised meal for that snake.

Of course a snake in the midst of digesting doesn’t really need to do anything whatsoever.

I suppose that’s true, depending on your type of snake. Does it need a drink of water?

So there it lies, a third of a snake with its tongue going in and out as snake tongues do, beady eyes looking at something and nothing at the same time.

Plump, dumb, and happy.

Just digesting away.

What happened to your man in the room?

He’s gone. He hasn’t decided yet if he’s going to get help or just plain gone.

I’m picturing him in a suit and hat, and in black and white, like the 1950’s. Why is that?

He walks about somewhat aimlessly.

I wonder whether a question of honor, so simply put, just seems anachronistic nowadays…

And it occurs to him that when you’re born, it’s the opposite. You become too big for the room. You leave, choicelessly. Can’t go back.

So you’re gonna say this fellow, he crouches down next to this here snake, and the snake looks up at him, and he starts telling your snake all about it.

And the snake listens like its got an elephant’s ears.

 

Saturday in Saratoga

S: Driving around today, I saw five or so blacks fishing off the bridge on the north side of the lake. The white people were, presumably, driving the boats on the lake itself.

R: How many African-Americans, did you say?

S: ‘bout five of them fishing, I’d say about five blacks.

R: Imagine that.

S: What?

R: I believe you’re not supposed to call them blacks.

S: Maybe those blacks are thinkin’ they can catch them one of them gleaming white boats the white people drive around in.

R: I believe you call it “sailing,” even if it’s engine-powered.

S: Then, near downtown, I saw a broken down CDTA bus, apparently in the middle of a run. All the riders were slouched around on the grounds of an abandoned gas station waiting for a replacement bus. Many of them, women and kids, looked to be some stripe of Latin—probably Mexicans. I did see one trashy white family. The dad was one of these real skinny types and he had a mustache and baseball hat and probably kicks his dog.

[pause]

R: Do you plan on waiting until I ask whether these roundish facts have any sort of point?

S: Well…I wonder if you know who rides the busses and fishes from the piers in this town.

R: Tell you what I do know. Or who, to put it straighter. I know someone who didn’t do a thing all day but look at African- and Mexican- and working-class-Americans then sit down on this bench bragging about it.