EMERGENCE IN EVERY POT.

Virginia Postrel laments the culture-war dimensions of synthetic meat.

I was naively stuck in the 20th century.

Back then, when I hung out with ideologues more than I do today, people on the American right liked technological innovation and market competition. They celebrated ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They might predict that a given product would fail or choose not to buy it—that’s the system, after all—but they weren’t affronted by the mere existence of for-profit approaches to social or environmental issues. They weren’t insulted by the idea that technology might alter attitudes by changing costs.

Now, everything is personal and I, who write as a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress, am read as a woke propagandist.

There's a logic lesson in what follows.

The best argument against the development of cell-grown meat is that technocrats believe that anything good must be mandatory, especially if the good thing claims to help the environment. So if someone invents cell-grown meat, government mandates will soon follow. We therefore shouldn’t encourage alternatives to the status quo lest we be forced to adopt them. It’s the same argument we hear from people who believe that saying cities should allow property owners more flexibility about what they build on their land is tantamount to banning single-family homes. This culture-war form of the precautionary principle is as bad as every other form. It’s a prescription for stasis.

I suppose. Somebody invented the motor-car. What followed wasn't quite government mandates, but there was a lot of nudging in the form of infrastructure spending and zoning codes.  Are the zoning codes a tool of the self-styled progressives or a new refuge for latter-day traditionalists?  Same thing with the politicization of streetcars.  Everything gets turned into a purity test.  At any time, though, what we understand as best practice has emerged because it confers evolutionary advantage.

Contrary to this view, ethical standards evolve in a bottom-up way. They aren’t simply imposed, by me or anyone else. Their evolution is influenced not only by cultural ideas but by economics and technology. Authorities may try to impose ethical standards or to hold them still over time (see: the Taliban and women’s education), but standards do shift. To take a simple example, for 10,000 years of human civilization, child labor was completely normal; it still is in some places. It gradually vanished as people got richer and investing in children’s education made more economic sense than putting them to work. We now generally view child labor as unethical—not because that’s an eternal truth but because we can afford to.

Whether synthetic meat will ever pass the "can afford to" test (as well as any taste and texture tests) remains to be seen.