The Limits of My World

I'm pretty disheartened to hear about the legal push-back against 23andme, a company that apparently offers incredibly accessible genetic testing/mapping. Regulators seem to have their eyes fixed on pulling them through the FDA wormhole. That it's going down in the way that it is isn't particularly surprising. What I find particularly unfortunate are the barbs being thrown by the government's supporters.

Putting aside arguments over the company's legal pragmatism or lack there-of in the run-up to this fight, there's something that I find increasingly despotic about the line of reasoning which constantly begs to save us from ourselves. Now, I don't want unsafe foods or unsafe drugs. Hell, I'm not particularly excited even by the thought of an unsafe refrigerator or toaster for that matter. And so I believe that third party review and verification is something that most consumers might kind of dig. But it's hard not to call into question these monolithic hierarchies of control and protocol; the alphabet soup of agencies that seemingly hold an increasing number of keys to an increasing number of locked doors. What are we to make of this predicament?

Well, I could choose to lay into the rather flaccid and unimpressive track record of these entities. How many countless people have been killed by how many countless consumables (or combinations thereof) thought to be safe by these agencies? And, maybe even worse, how many people are dying every single year because "unverified" consumables are out of their very terminal reach? I suppose I could even go into the ins and outs of exactly why monopolistic social structures of all kinds lead to inevitably poor outcomes for those who rely on them, but it's a point I find myself very tired of repeating.

What holds out as more interesting to me is the absolute pervasiveness of paternalism among the supporters of such regulatory schemes. Even stepping back from the specifics of this particular instance, it seems clear to me that we've almost completely accepted a sphere of permissiveness around our lives; that we've traded in any meaningful sense of autonomy or equality for what seems to be a woefully misguided sense of security and safety. Gone appear to be the days of a deeper sense of personal responsibility to ourselves and to others. We've managed to contract virtue itself out of our hands.

And at the barren heights of our conceived cleverness, what have we got to show for it? We steal in the name of charity. We war in the name of peace. We deprive in the name of security. Oh, how deeply conflicted we've become.

And so here I sit listening to countless people ridicule the defenders of freedom:

"Oh, well, I don't know about you, but I don't really miss the 'freedom' to buy unsafe, untested products. Are we really expected to believe that you'll be losing out because you can't buy snake oil?"

Yes.

I do expect that of you.

I want the freedom to have any individual or group analyze my genetic make-up. I want the freedom to go to a church down the street that will lead me into believing in a false god. I want the freedom to be convinced by a blogger to start eating a steady diet of lard to improve my health. I want the freedom to engage in acupuncture therapy to cure my terminal illness. I want the freedom to buy a lighter so that I can bundle up my life-savings, in cash, and set it on fire. I want the freedom to go buy a gallon of bleach and then drink it. I want the freedom to get my 401k investment advice from a fortune teller. I want the freedom to move into some guy's compound and throw on some black clothes, dawn some Nike's, and drink shitty Kool-Aid in hopes of catching a UFO that's hiding behind a passing comet.

Sooner or later you and I are going to have to come to grips with the fact that freedom, in any amount, entails potential harm - both to ourselves and to others. And we have to realize that these ever-shifting proscriptive legal lines that we draw are ultimately arbitrary. Any and all freedoms that we enjoy, down to and including indulgence in the sacred religious texts we hold so dear (the Bible, etc.) can inform us in ways that are benign, malign, and all shades in between. The only way to make us truly safe from one another is to affect a world of individual isolation and complete arrest.

It's not clear to me that the supporters of far-reaching governmental oversight support such a vision of the future. So, then, I'm compelled to ask just what point one imagines such a reach to actually end at? It seems to me that many more people's live are entirely shifted (and often not for the better) by the common rhetoric of the priestly and metaphysical caste than by some arbitrary company providing a preliminary mapping of genetic markers for people. And yet the latter seems to be so much more obviously fit for our scorn and regulatory action...at least according to the more vocal of us. So why is it so? Why impede and intervene upon something so seemingly innocuous while stopping miles short of the kind of social coercion that has a fairly clear track record of ruining so many lives? I should expect a relatively sound explanation for what seems to be so arbitrary of a distinction. And yet I don't think I'll find a satisfactory one. I think it should give us all a bit of pause.

Doubling Down on Prejudice

Over the years my position on free speech and its collision with political correctness has evolved fairly drastically. While I can say that I've held fairly steadfast to an absolutist conception of free speech, my views on reactionary speech and political correctness have more drastically shifted; moving from an almost complete excoriation of political correctness to a much wider embrace of it...and finally to something somewhat in between. I no longer see the contention between freedom of speech and our general duties of beneficence towards one another that I used to. And so I still hold sympathies on both sides of what seems like a common political schism.

All of that being said, there's an argument that I have heard one too many times lately (from defenders of free speech) that seems to not only ring hollow, but actually self-incriminating as well. It's an argument that gets pulled up when talking about the "correctness" (political or otherwise) of using what may be commonly seen as a prejudicial slur to excoriate (or even joke with) other people for whom the term would not literally apply. A common example would be a group of men who ridicule someone within the group for "chickening out" on something by calling them "gay". Obviously, many in the homosexual community would find that kind of behavior pretty offensive. What's almost just as offensive is this argument that I've seen people use to defend it.

The argument goes something like this:

"Well is it really that offensive? I mean, think about it. I'm not actually calling him gay. I'm just using it because that's what you say when you want to annoy someone."

Surprisingly enough, this line of argument is bought by a pretty large swath of people. And they seem fairly unaware of how they are clearly doubling down on the initial mistake. Let me flesh out that response by re-wording it, just to see if the issue can be teased out by those who might not see it:

"Oh, come on, I'm not really insulting him. I'm not saying he's actually gay. I mean, if I was, then that would really be an insult. But I'm not doing that."

It's really amazing how many people I've heard try to torpedo themselves into the clear by anchoring themselves to that line of thought. For anyone who is still unclear on the issue at hand, the error is not in the false identification of someone as being gay, but in the false identification of being gay as being something lesser. Chances are that if you're missing this finer point, you're probably missing the point of the argument against prejudiced terminology more generally.