I got this message from the pro-democracy organisation giving their assessment of Labour’s proposed policies as revealed on the Labour list website. They welcome many of them, but criticise Labour for not including proportional representation, repealing the harsh anti-protest laws or defending the political independence of the electoral commission.
‘Dear David,
Yesterday, the LabourList website published a summary of Labour’s draft policy platform – likely to be the foundation of Labour’s 2024 manifesto. There’s a lot in there that we at Open Britain can get excited about, but also some concerning omissions which we simply can’t ignore.
Let’s start with the positive. We’re finally seeing some fleshed-out policy on key issues, and from what we can see, it does look like Labour is taking public concerns around the environment, economy and security seriously. Of particular interest to us, though, is the section at the bottom entitled “Reform Westminster and Devolve Power.” Here are some of the plans featured there:
Reducing the voting age to 16
Greater devolution of power to the nations
Creation of the Integrity and Ethics Commission, which looks into breaches of ministerial code and misconduct
Banning second jobs for MPs
Replacing the House of Lords with an elected chamber
Cracking down on political donations from shell companies
This is all really good, sensible stuff. It shows a distinctive move away from the current government’s anti-democratic legislative agenda and a commitment to restoring public trust in politics, getting younger people involved, and putting the Boris Johnson days long behind us.
But there is an elephant in the room that we need to talk about. Proportional representation is a potentially disastrous omission. PR is supported en masse by Labour stakeholders across the board because it would fundamentally change Westminster’s toxic, win-at-all-costs dynamic. It would also make more people’s votes count, restoring their confidence in the system. Starmer can’t just wish the calls for PR away.
And there are some other elephants in the room too. What about revisiting this government’s sly voter identification policy? What about repealing the Policing and Public Order Acts so that dissenters aren’t arbitrarily thrown into cells? What about reinstating the independence of the Electoral Commission? As much as we applaud this positive constitutional agenda, there’s a lot of damage being done right now that it won’t undo.
Imagine this policy package with those additions. That would be the kind of landmark reform that would boost this country’s mood almost overnight, unleashing the democratic power of so many who have gone without a voice for so long.
We don’t want just to imagine it. We want to make it real. We want to make our voices so loud that the Labour leadership has to listen. This agenda shows that they understand the issues we face – but they’re not yet willing to do everything it takes to address them. Let’s keep the pressure on.
Yesterday I put up a piece arguing that the government’s proposed crackdown on home schooling wasn’t because of official mistrust of White, socially conservative individuals but probably motivated by fear of radical Muslims taking their children out of the educational system. I still think this is probably the case. But I included in the piece the argument that Kate Forbes, the contender for replacing Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP and Scotland’s First Minister, has been the subject of unfair criticism because of her Christian beliefs. Forbes doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, gay marriage and abortion, and it’s odds-on she doesn’t believe in the trans ideology either. From the way this has been presented by certain right-wing YouTubers, it sounds like she is being subjected to criticism as Christian in a way that does not happen to people of different religions with similar views. But this isn’t simply a matter of Forbes’ personal beliefs. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters on this blog, pointed out that she has very strong connections to a Christian anti-abortion lobby group with a link to a story, ‘Kate Forbes’ political career began with role paid by anti-abortion lobby group’, by Adam Ramsay and Caitlin Logan of Open Democracy. This begins
‘SNP leadership contender Kate Forbes’ first job in the Scottish parliament was funded by an anti-abortion Christian lobby group that doesn’t disclose its financial backers, openDemocracy can reveal.
The group, Christian Action, Research and Education (CARE), is known for its opposition to abortion, sex education and LGBTIQ+ rights. It has long funded a controversial internship scheme in the Scottish parliament, paying for young supporters to act as researchers for MSPs for around a year, so they can learn better how to influence public policy.
Speaking to openDemocracy today, retired SNP MSP Dave Thompson, Forbes’ predecessor as the MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, confirmed that her time working with him, believed to be around 2011, was funded through CARE’s scheme.
Last year, openDemocracy revealed that more than 20 MPs in Westminster have also taken on interns funded by CARE since 2010. And as well as its internship programmes, CARE employs a lobbyist at the Scottish parliament who has met with numerous MSPs in recent years to discuss issues including their opposition to hate crime laws and trans rights.
The organisation has an income of almost £2m a year but doesn’t disclose where it gets this money from.
Since being elected to Holyrood in 2016, Forbes has granted considerable access to Christian right lobby groups. Almost 10% of her meetings as an MSP with registered lobbyists have been with representatives of ultraconservative groups, including CARE, the Evangelical Alliance and the Christian Institute. Together, these groups have a turnover of around £8m a year. None reveal the sources of their funding.
In a blog on its website this week, CARE described Forbes as “an evangelical Christian who would have voted against same-sex marriage, believes only married couples should have children, is pro-life, and believes biological sex is immutable”.
Forbes has caused controversy in recent days by saying she would have voted against same-sex marriage had she been an MSP during the 2014 vote, and that she opposes sex before marriage.
But she hasn’t previously declared that she got her foot on the first rung of the Holyrood ladder through CARE’s controversial scheme.
openDemocracy understands that Forbes took up the role in Thompson’s office around 2011. She graduated from Cambridge University with an undergraduate history degree that year, and then completed a master’s at Edinburgh University in 2013. When Thompson retired, she was his “personal choice” to replace him, The Inverness Courier reported at the time.’
This all suggests that for Forbes, this is not a matter for her private conscience and that she will try to influence the Scots parliament on these issues, even though this would mean overturning existing legislation that has the support of the public.
As some of the great commenters on this blog have pointed out, Simon Webb of History Debunked is a great advocate of home schooling. He makes no secret of this, and talks often about how he home schooled his daughter. He also used to run a blog called ‘Home School Heretic’. A few days ago he posted a piece about how the government was introducing legislation to make home schooling more difficult. He believes, or suggested, that this is a government attempt to enforce ideological conformity on the population by preventing parents from opting out of the official education system. He quoted part of the new legislation, which stated that it was concerned about the home schooling leading to the growth of parallel societies.
Now I do know people, who have home schooled their children because of concerns about the local schools in their area. Their children did really well, got their ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels and went on to university. As far as I can make out, they share the same values as the rest of mainstream British society. Back a decade and a half or so ago, there was a panic over the growth of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Various atheist and sceptics’ groups were panicking about what they saw as ‘science denialism’. A number of fundamentalist Christian groups also pushed home schooling as a way adults could avoid having their children indoctrinated with evolution and so put on the path to state mandated secularism and atheism. That furore eventually blew over. But a friend, who taught religion, told me that most Creationists were Muslims, as were, I think, most home schoolers. But all you ever heard about on the BBC and the mainstream news was about Christian Creationists. The wording of the document Webb was complaining about suggests to me that the government is really concerned about alienated Muslims taking their children out of school to give them a very conservative upbringing, but dare not say it outright. I’ve had the general impression that Christianity, because it has largely been the religion of the White majority of this country, is now a whipping boy for fears about the growth of radical religious movement in ethnic minorities. Christianity can be criticised without accusations of racism or Islamophobia, and Christians won’t, as a rule, start sending death threats.
For example, the right-wing media and vloggers have been discussing this week the criticism directed at somebody Forbes, the woman now tipped to replace Nicola Sturgeon. Forbes is a church-going Presbyterian with very traditional, social conservative views. She doesn’t approve of sex before marriage, gay marriage or the transgender ideology. And so various newspapers, including the Scum, have been denouncing her as unsuitable for the post of Scots First Minister. The same thing happened to the Lib Dems’ Tim Farron. He went to an evangelical church, which also viewed homosexuality as a sin. He was constantly asked, as no-other politico was, whether he shared their views with the implication that if he did, he shouldn’t be in politics. And the attack on religious individuals now includes gay groups, who disagree with them but maintain their right to hold such opinions. The EDIJester posted a piece this morning, which included the story that the LGB Alliance, a gay advocacy group, had been contacted by the Beeb for their comment. Their chief spokeswomen replied that they disagreed with her beliefs, but religion is a protected characteristic and she has a right to hold them. This was not what the Beeb’s producer wanted to hear. The Alliance was contacted again, and told that they would not be using them in the programme. If this is true, then the Beeb wanted to present it as debate in which Forbes would be denounced for her views by all gay groups.
The BBC has also produced very biased programmes misrepresenting religious issues before. A few years ago I picked up a book about political bias at the Beeb written by a Conservative. It was published during Blair’s government, and presented a convincing case. And one of these was a documentary about the Roman Catholic church’s abstinence-only policy towards contraception in Africa. The programme argued that this was causing Black Africans to suffer unwanted pregnancies and catch AIDS purely because of religious dogma. In fact, the abstinence-only policy, surprisingly, has been successful in cutting down on both. There is a very strong cultural hostility in African society to contraception. Nigel Barley, in his book The Innocent Anthropologist, remarks that there’s a joke that the only thing that will go through the Nigerian postal system and not be interfered with is a packed of condoms. In this environment, where contraception will be refused in any case, it makes sense to stress abstinence. But this conflicted with the received opinions of western liberals, who produced a deliberately deceptive programme.
In the case of Forbes and Farron, all that should be needed to be said is that although they personally may disapprove, they will not interfere in previous legislation. I think Forbes may have said that, but it obviously isn’t enough. But I do wonder if the same questions would be asked if she belonged to a non-Christian religion. I suspect she wouldn’t.
In the meantime, I think Webb can stop fretting. I don’t think the government is really worried about ultra-Conservative right-wingers like him. I think the real, unspoken fear is about Islam.
I found this horrendous issue being debated by Leo Kearse and the rest on GB News this morning. A philosophy professor in Oslo has suggested in a paper that brain-dead women could serve as surrogate mothers for women who were unable or unwilling to go through pregnancy themselves. The general reaction to the idea was revulsion, though the presenter said that philosophers often make extreme or outrageous suggestions just to start a conversation. There were also jokes about how mixed any children would be, born of a corpse. Of course, such women wouldn’t be corpses, just living women artificially kept alive through life-support machines. But one of them makes the serious point how you can tell if someone is braindead. The professor has made the comparison between his idea and organ donation. This is a reasonable moral problem – how is harvesting the organs of the dead any different from using the bodies of the braindead to bring children into the world? I suspect that the professor’s suggestion is really part of an attempt to explore the moral dimensions around donor organs. In that sense it’s a deliberately provocative statement intended to stimulate debate, not a serious suggestion.
But for readers of Dune it immediately raises the spectre of the Tleilaxu and their axolotl tanks, as one commenter pointed out. The Tleilaxu are one of the races in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. They specialise in genetic engineering and the creation of a form of clones, known as gholas. But they’re also clones themselves, born from the axolotl tanks. Only men are seen, which makes the other peoples of the galaxy suspect that the axolotl tanks themselves are the remains of their women. It’s a truly horrendous idea, and is part of SF’s tradition of exploring the shocking and dystopian. If the unnamed professor’s suggestion was serious, it would come a step closer to becoming reality rather than science fiction. But I don’t think it is serious, and if it was, it would face a number of serious moral objections.
On the other hand, the story is reported in the Heil, many of whose journo are, I believe, products of genetic engineering themselves. People that right-wing and bonkers are surely the products of deranged technology.
This is a response to a video Simon Webb put up some days ago. I meant to review it earlier, but there’s only so much fascism you can take, especially in today’s miserable economic situation and the Tories telling one lie after another. Webb’s video was prompted by a speech from the Japanese premier declaring that there was an existential crisis facing the Japanese the people. If they didn’t have more babies, they would die out. Webb notes that in the Beeb report about this, they stated that it could be solved by the Japanese importing people like other countries, but that the Japanese were firmly against this.
The Japanese have been worried about this for a very long time. Back in the 1990s the-then Japanese prime minister announced that if the country didn’t halt its declining birth rate, then they would be extinct in a thousand years’ time. That really is looking at the long term picture. To solve this problem, successive Japanese governments have suggested and embarked on various policies. One was that husbands should spend more time with their families in order to develop a closer relationship with their wives, with the unspoken implication that this would lead to more babies on the way. This provoked sharp criticism from one housewife, who complained that marital relations wouldn’t improve simply because the husband was at home more. The Japanese government has also set up a state dating agency to bring men and women together.
I suspect Japan’s demographic problems are partly due to particularly Japanese problems. There is, or was, a high rate of divorce among Japanese pensioners. This is caused by the Japanese work ethic, in which men work all the hours that God sends in order to support their families and make their country prosperous. The result is that they barely see their wives and families. When they retire, they find out that they have nothing in common and divorce. It’s a theme that was reflected in Japanese business novels. These featured loyal, hardworking sararimen, whose lives fall apart. They’re laid off by the companies they’ve loyally served and their families break up until they end up left behind running a small shop somewhere, lamenting that they’ve missed out on seeing their children grow up.
There’s also a trend among young Japanese not to date and have children. There was a Radio 4 programme, which I sadly missed, discussing this issue. It reported that this aversion was so severe that many young people even find the act of love itself repulsive. I wondered if this was a reaction to Japanese sex education and whatever Japanese youth is taught about sex outside marriage. If the attitudes against it are too harsh and the insistence on purity so strong, then it’s possible that this could lead to some impressionable people developing such a strong revulsion to sex. I remember from my schooldays that the sex education we were exposed to, with its clinical description of physical development and reproduction, as well as fears about the rising divorce rate, could almost have been calculated to put kids off sex. I also wonder if it’s due to the unavailability of contraception in Japan. This isn’t due to moral scruples, as in Roman Catholic Ireland. It was demanded by the Japanese medical complex, in order to protect the doctors that made money from performing abortions. Buddhism and Shinto have a series of three gods or kami, who preside over the souls of dead children. According to the anthropologist Dr Nigel Barley in his study of cultural attitudes to death and the dead across the world, Dancing with the Dead, the shrine to these gods are particularly supported by women, who’ve had abortions. I’m not criticising women’s right to abortions here, just noting that in previous decades over here the lack of contraception and the strong societal disapproval to births out of wedlock was a very strong disincentive to people, and especially women, having premarital sex.
In fact birth rates are declining across the world, mostly significantly in the developed west, but also elsewhere. One demographer interviewed a few decades ago in New Scientist predicted that in the middle years of this century the world would suffer a demographic crash. This is in stark contradiction with the 70s fears about the population explosion and ‘population bomb’. In many European countries the birth rate is below the level of population replacement.
Webb suggested that we might try to copy the Nazis, who gave medals to women who had large families. There were different medals award according to how many children they had. In fact, all the totalitarian states had similar policies. The Russians had their Heroic Mother awards, duly covered by Pravda, and Musso had a similar policy in his ‘Battle for Births’ campaign. If reproduction is a battle, it means people are doing it wrong. And if it’s a real physical battle, then it’s rape. But I think Musso meant it metaphorically, as everything was a battle in Fascist Italy. The campaign to increase cereal yield in agriculture was labelled ‘the Battle for Grain’. But Musso included in his policies to increase the birth rate various welfare benefits to make it easier and support women, who chose to have large families.
Webb has been followed in this by Laurence Fox, who gave a sermon on GB News yesterday, about his instinct that society was coming to an end because of the low birth rate in the west. This was breaking the social link Edmund Burke had said existed between the past, present and future generations. Of course, as a man of the right he has no sympathy for people demanding expanded welfare rights, accusing them of being ‘entitled’. They’re not. They’re people on the breadline demanding not expanded welfare provision, but proper welfare provision restored to adequate levels.
Plastic priest Calvin Robinson similarly discussed demographic decline in another piece for GB News. He was much more open about the provision of proper welfare support for families, arguing that Britain should follow the lead of Poland and Hungary. And then comes the element of racism. Because if we did this, like those countries we would not have to import people from outside.
And this is part of the problem.
Underneath these fears of demographic decline is the particular fear of White demographic decline. Other ethnic groups have larger families. Hence the stupid, malign conspiracy theories about ‘Eurabia’, that Muslims would outbreed Whites in the west and so eventually take over society. The French National Front let the cat out of the bag in the 90s. This was the mayor of one of the southern French cities, who had set up a system of welfare payments to encourage his citizens to have more babies. Except that this was a racist policy that applied only to Whites. Blacks, Asians and Muslims not allowed.
It’s why such a system would also have severe problems being introduced over here. And rightly so, as while I dare say that some members of ethnic groups don’t want to integrate or adopt British culture, others identify very strongly with it and see themselves as English, Welsh, Scots whatever. Such people shouldn’t be excluded from receiving these welfare payments simply because of the colour of their skin, whatever else one thinks of race relations and immigration.
Of course, the right blames the demographic crisis squarely on feminism and the way modern women are encouraged to pursue careers rather than raise families. Hence the Lotus Eaters put up a piece commenting on a report that half of all women are childless at thirty. To be fair, some left-wing feminists have also complained that feminism, for all its good intentions, has also denigrated the vital role of motherhood in society. But traditional attitudes towards gender roles may be part of the problem. In the New Scientist article I talked about earlier, it was noted that the countries with lowest birth rates had the most traditional attitudes towards childrearing, in which it was seen as primarily the responsibility of the mothers. This extended across cultures, from Italy in Europe to Japan. The countries which had the highest birth rates in the west were the Nordic countries, where men were being encouraged to help their wives with domestic chores and raising the sprogs.
That, and welfare policies designed to help working parents, seem far better solutions to the crisis than simply doling out medals based on the attitudes of totalitarian regimes.
Jeremy Bentham was a British 19th century philosopher. He was the inventor of Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that states that something is good if it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This, however, fails as it neglects the fact that some things are inherently good or evil even though they may be popular. One of the examples of this would be a case where a mob demands the execution of a wrongly accused man. It is still wrong to execute an innocent person, even if this is massively popular and demanded by the majority of people. Bentham was also interested in prison reform and design. In his view, prisons should be laid out so that the prisoners and their activities were all under surveillance from a central hub, the panopticon. This constant surveillance would, he believed, lead to prisoners acquiring the habit of behaving decently and legally and so reform their characters ready for release back into society. Modern critics consider it a chilling, totalitarian surveillance society in miniature. Another of his ideas is truly bonkers. He believed that people – presumably members of the aristocracy and people accustomed to public service and social prominence – should preserve their ancestors after death through mummification and embalming, and put them on display as ‘autoicons’. The intention behind this bizarre idea is that people, surrounded by their dead relatives and antecedents, would then feel themselves encouraged to emulate their virtues. Bentham had himself preserved, and is on display in a glass case at Oxford University, except for his head, which is a waxwork. His real head is in a case somewhere, and not displayed.
However, the Utilitarians were behind the early 19th century hygiene reforms that cleaned up Britain’s cities by demanding proper sewage and the removal of waste from the streets to improve the inhabitants’ lives and health. And he was also a very much a political radical. He outlined his democratic views in Democracy – A Fragment. He believed that people weren’t naturally virtuous and public spirited, and that they acted primarily in their own interest. This meant that those governing also acted in their own interest, which was to expand their power against everyone else. They could only be kept in line through democracy and all adults possessing the vote. And he meant all adults. The franchise should be extended to include not just all adult men, but also women. He also wanted the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England. This was in the 1820s, and it was nearly a century before British women acquired the right to vote. As for the abolition of the monarchy, the Lords and the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, Tony Benn was reviled as a Communist for advocating them, plus nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. They’re not policies I support, though the House of Lords needs radical reform as at the moment it has more members than the ruling general assembly of the Chinese Communist Party. But I am impressed with his staunch advocacy of democracy, especially at a time when many would have regarded it almost as seditious because of the excesses of the French Revolution.
And unfortunately he does have a point about the corruption of the governing class. We’ve seen it in the way the Tory administrations of the past eleven years have passed endless laws to benefit their class at the expense of Britain’s working people, and themselves personally. As when one of their number decided to relax the planning laws while angling for a lucrative property deal in London.
There have been voices on the internet claiming that democracy is in crisis and that people are giving up on it. If that’s the case, then it’s because we don’t have enough democracy in Britain. Last year we saw three prime ministers come and go, but were not allowed to elect any of them. It’s high time this changed.
This is a bit abstract, but as it involves issues about the objective reality of moral values and justice against moral relativism, it needs to be tackled. A few days ago the Lotus Eaters published an essay on their website by Helen Dale, which denied that there were such things as objective moral values. This followed an conversation on YouTube between Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Gasbag, and the philosopher Peter Boghossian, in which Sargon was also arguing that objective moral values don’t exist. People, including myself, have taken the mick out of Sargon, pointing out that he’s not university educated and that at one point his standard response to his opponents seemed to be to ask if they hadn’t read John Locke. But Sargon’s bright and is well-read in political philosophy, albeit from the Conservative, Libertarian perspective.
Which seems to be where his denial of objective morality comes. Conservatives since Edmund Burke have stressed the importance of tradition, and from what I remember of Sargon’s debate with Boghossian, he was arguing that concepts like human rights and democracy are the unique products of western culture. These notions are alien and incomprehensible to other culture, such as Islam, which have their own value systems, notions of justice and ideas about their ultimate grounding. Now Sargon does have a point. Human rights seem obvious to us, because we have grown up in a society in which such notions have developed over centuries, dating back to the 18th century and beyond, going back to the Roman idea of the Lex Gentiles, the Law of Nations. This was the idea that there were fundamental assumptions about justice that was common to all nations and which could be used as the basis for international law. And the Enlightenment philosophers were confident that they could also discover an objective basis for morality. This has not happened. One of the problems is the values which are to be regarded as fundamental also need supporting arguments, and morality has changed over time. This can be seen in the west in the changing attitudes to sex outside marriage and homosexuality. Back in the early 20th century both were regarded as immoral, but are now accepted. In the case of homosexuality, moral condemnation has been reversed so that it is the persecution of gays that it rightly regarded as immoral. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin was aware of the changes in morality over time, and deeply influenced by the 17th century Italian philosopher Vico. His solution, as someone who bitterly hated Stalin’s USSR and its tyranny, was to argue that although objective moral values didn’t exist, there were nevertheless moral values that acted as such.
I can see some positive aspects to Sargon’s position. If it is accepted that western ideas of truth and justice are just that, localised western notions, that it prevents them from being used as pretexts for foreign imperialist ventures like the Neo-Con invasions of the Middle East. It brings us back to the old, pre-War American conservative values that held that America had no business interfering in the political institutions and concerns of other peoples. But it also leaves the way open for cultural relativism and the justification of despotic regimes. If there are no objective moral values, then there can be no firm moral objections to obvious injustices, such as the genocide of the Uighurs in China or the Taliban’s recent decision to deprive women of university education. From what I’ve been reading, Chinese nationalist communists dismiss such ideas of democracy and human rights as baizuo, which translates as White liberal nonsense. And the Fascists and Communists Sargon despises were also moral relativists. Both Mussolini and Hitler also declared that each nation had their own set of unique moral values and that liberal notions of justice and humanity did not apply to their regimes. In a number of his speeches Lenin denied that there were any eternal moral values, but that these changed instead with each historical epoch, as determined by the economic structure of society at the time. This opened the way to the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
The Lotus Eaters are also staunch enemies of wokeness, but Critical Theory in its various forms also relativizes traditional morality and attitudes arguing that these too are merely the local intellectual products of the west, and specifically White heterosexual elite men. This has led to Postcolonial Theorists betraying feminists and human rights activists in nations like India, by refusing to criticise these cultures repressive traditions, or instead blaming them on western imperialism.
My own belief is that there are indeed objective moral values although human moral intuitions have changed over time. Notions of democracy and human rights may have their origin in the west, but they are nevertheless universal and universally applicable. This does not mean that other cultures may not adopt and adapt them according to their own cultural traditions. In the case of Islam, there are any number of books by the Islamic modernists arguing that modern notions of human rights are perfectly in accordance with Muslim values.
For the sake of genuine humanity and international justice and the eradication of tyranny, we have to believe that there are objective moral values protecting human life and freedom.
This is further to the video I put up earlier about the possibility of artificial wombs and EctoLife’s wretched proof of concept video promoting their plans for a hatchery. This is another video that came up for me on YouTube. It’s a news report from Sydney’s 7 News posted by the Women and Infants Research Foundation about a very premature baby, who was kept alive and brought to term through being incubated in an artificial womb. In fact the womb is a plastic bag filled with oxygen to help the baby’s lungs develop naturally. It’s clearly related to the biobags developed at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, although those were filled with amniotic fluid. The video looks forward to further experiments on baby lambs where the bags would be filled with amniotic fluid. As it is, although the bag used was described as an artificial womb, it’s not that far from a conventional incubator.
While I’m obviously pleased that this technique was able to save the baby’s life, and hopefully other babies like him, I have very strong moral reservations about the development of true artificial wombs and the type of hatcheries that EctoLife are keen to develop. The fact that this technique has not become mainstream suggests that it either doesn’t work as effectively as predicted or else medical authorities are extremely worried about the ethical implications of this research.
Hashem al-Ghaili posted this fascinating and chilling video on his channel on YouTube two years. It begins with a description and images of a hatchery of birth pods containing human babies, almost exactly like that unveiled this week by EctoLife as a proof of the concept. It then goes back and traces the scientific development of the technology. The first artificial womb was designed in the 1950s but not built. Then researchers in Japan built and test one using goat fetuses. It then moves on 2017 and the experiments with infant lambs in biobags at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital before ending two years ago with very elaborate pods which also monitor the baby’s vital signs. The video states that artificial wombs have been designed to help premature babies, especially those born before 24 weeks, whose survival rates are almost negligible.
The similarity between the pods in the video and EctoLifes is very close, which suggests to me that the people developing this concept have been doing it in one form or another for a very long time. While I have no arguments against helping premature babies to survive, there are huge moral questions over the way such technology would lead, such as the complete abolition of natural birth and the mass manufacture of human beings in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
This is really chilling. Interesting Engineering, a YouTube channel devoted to news about cutting edge science and technology, put up a piece today about a company, EctoLife, launching the concept of a mass artificial womb facility, that could produce 30,000 births a year. The channel said that the use of the term ‘produce’ was deliberate, as the company also intends to have tools that would allow parents to customise their children.
This is really chilling, as it seems some moron has read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and thought it was a good idea. Huxley’s SF classic is set in a community 200 years after the Fordist Revolution. The family has been abolished and children are born from hatcheries, genetically manipulated and conditioned for their predetermined roles in society. Sex is purely recreational, and parental terms like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are considered obscenities and unspeakable insults if directed at people. Drugs are used recreationally, and it’s a hedonistic culture directed towards pleasure in which genuine cultural progress has ceased, and art, literature and so on aren’t valued. I think it’s been filmed at least twice. There was a miniseries in the 1980s/90s, if I remember correctly, and another TV version at the beginning of this century.
People have been predicting the development of artificial wombs for a long time. Way back around 1984/5 the Observer ran a piece about them and what they would mean for the people born from them. They were also included in one of the articles speculating about future scientific discoveries and how they would impact humans in a 1990s issue of Scientific American. This included a photo of goat embryos being grown in a lab.
There are any number of ethical issues about this. The most immediate is the divorce of human reproduction from biology. I can see how the development of such techniques could help those women, who want children but are physically unable to carry a child. But this also raises the spectre of the mass industrial production of humans, the withering away or abolition of the traditional family and its replacement by the company or the state, as well as the genetic engineering of humans to suit the wishes of the parents. This is really dark, dystopian stuff, and recalls some of the fears that were discussed with the development of test-tube children back in the 1970s.
On the other hand, I do wonder if this is actually a serious proposition. A number of companies have announced very ambitious scientific schemes in the past. Back in the 90s once again, one American company declared it was seriously interested in developing a space elevator. That’s a giant lift that would take capsules up into space so they could be launched using far less energy than on Earth. That’s an idea made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his book The Fountains of Paradise. It also needs far tougher materials than are available at present. In order to withstand the immense weight and stresses, the elevator would need to be made of a material 80 times stronger than steel. There have been interesting developments in the creation of tough carbon fibres, but at the present level of technology the construction of such an edifice is impossible. There was a piece in one of the popular science mags, I think it may have been New Scientist, in which the author predicted that we’d see space elevators in perhaps two or three decades’ time, given recent progress. Well, perhaps. But I’m still sceptical, just as I’m sceptical about this ever becoming a reality. Note that they’re talking about ‘concept’ rather than reality. That says to me that this may well be just hype, and they’re actually a long way away from creating it.
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