IS MARXISM THE OPIATE OF THE WORLD COUNCIL? At Nanodot (via Insta Pundit), some reservations about a World Council of Churches position paper on (what else?) nanotechnology. The writers at Nanodot focus on potential problems with what appears to be a strong form of the Precautionary Principle and the report's emphasis on "democratic control" of technologies.

First, I’m not sure it’s true that public confidence in science is at an all time low. Perhaps this is true in Europe, but I think scientists in the U.S. are still respected, especially compared to some other professions, such as politicians. Second, I wonder whether WCC really wants to say that it’s justified to call for a moratorium on nanotech research until the materials are shown to be safe. Sounds like research to me.

Third, note the repeated use of the term “democratic control” including “democratic control…of science”. Sounds plausible at first hearing. But democratic control means majority control, and in many countries Christians are in the minority. In other countries they are still the dominant culture but losing ground fast. Are the rights of these Christians to learn science and develop and use technologies to be determined by the majority? This may merit further thought.

Alternatively, what happens if the Christians who make up the majority coalition are not the blue-state World Council Christians, but the red-state Special Creation Christians?

But it is to that "democratic control" that I wish to speak. The phrase is one also popular with socialists of the participatory economics stripe. Dig into the Council's report and note,

While there are remarkable scientists who have shown an outstanding sense of responsibility and solidarity with the poor and marginalized, a majority of them have accepted a more and more corporate dominated and market-driven approach to scientific research and its technological applications. Much of the funding for basic research depends today on government funding for military research or on a private sector that takes control of the results through patenting and copyright regimes.

New technologies need to be assessed in terms of social (marginalization), cultural (perspectives of life), economic (monopolies, profits), political (dominance and power), and military (new weapons of mass destruction) impact and consequences. It is important not only to notice, but to understand, the shift away from science and technology as instruments and tools for human development towards the much more sophisticated notion of its power and capacity to transform and to re-design the basic elements of matter – and thus the building blocks – of the community of life as we know it. The newly emerging technology [c.q.] are paving the way for the commodification of life at a much more basic level.

Production for profit, not for use? (As if, without technological change, there would be no poor. Vacuously true, perhaps, if only because everyone would be equally poor.) Commodification? No accumulations of surplus value or fundamental contradictions, but there is a world to win.

While advocating such a paradigm shift, it should be clear to everybody that a major re-orientation of the dominant political economy and culture is not a simple undertaking, but requires an enormous effort of resistance, struggle for alternatives, un-learning of threatening attitudes, habits, values and worldviews, and learning what it means to live in conviviality with all life on earth as our common home.

Question: doesn't "advocating" under "democratic" conditions mean a majority could say "no?" And doesn't the lion lay down with the lamb in Heaven?

The Council report, taken as a whole, reads like a bad parody of a sophomore seminar in cultural studies. When I reached this paragraph, I abandoned further reading.

In a world where human improvement or “enhancement” becomes a technological imperative, the rights of people who do not meet the “norm”, for example people with disabilities, will be further eroded and impairments or disabilities will be perceived as technological challenges rather than as issues of social justice. How long before democratic dissent is viewed as a correctable “impairment” as well?

Cheap debating trick: invoke Logan's Run by way of an allusion to the eugenics programs -- not all run by Nazis -- of the 1920s and 1930s. (Aren't eyeglasses and hearing aids and those electric wheelchairs also responses to technological challenges?) Continue by demonstrating an ignorance of the Sermon on the Mount. Isn't the correction of impairments precisely the goal of "liberating tolerance" and, say, the establishment of "free-speech zones" of order epsilon at Jesuit colleges?