Something disquieting lurks among the otherwise entirely predictable responses to the announcement last week that a human embryo has been cloned. On one hand, there is rejoicing that another great step has been taken towards the alleviation of human suffering. On the other hand, there is the standard chorus of horror and alarm to the effect that mankind is interfering with nature, usurping the prerogatives of God, and undermining the sanctity of life.
With the rejoicing one wholeheartedly concurs. In response to those who would rather see existing human beings suffer than to see a tiny clutch of cells adapted to ending that suffering, a speaking silence should suffice. But the disquieting fact is that even those working towards therapeutic cloning, thereby offering an immense boon to humanity's future, are eager to say that they aim only to produce stem cells for research, and have no intention of cloning humans. This defensiveness yields too much to the ignorance and prejudice of the opposition.
For what is wrong with cloning humans? It is nothing other than to produce a twin. Is there anything unnatural or evil about twins? Think of a couple denied children by the husband's sterility. Is it better that his wife should be impregnated by a male stranger via a glass tube than that they should produce a child wholly hers - technically her twin but in all other social and emotional respects their child to love and nourish? Might not a child who is the product of donor insemination wonder who her "real" father is, and be troubled by ignorance of her origins? In the cloning case, she would have no such anxieties.
The nonsense people talk about cloning stems from the prison cell of religious belief. Pious exclamations about the sanctity of life, and about not interfering with God's purposes, conceal a farrago of confusion. Life's sanctity resides in its quality, not its mere quantity, for there is nothing sacred in suffering. And if we were to "avoid interfering with God's purposes" we would not use penicillin, nor raise money for the third world's starving, nor build a roof over our children's heads (which, as it happens, Jesus instructed us not to - "consider the lilies of the field" - but not even Christians are foolish enough to obey).
If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big, mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions every day, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes - and too great a mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also, as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible for the ubiquitous and unabatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.
Some among us are disgusted by the thought of such a thing in the universe, and are mightily glad that the arguments alleging the existence of anything like it are nugatory, having the same intellectual respectability as arguments about the existence of fairies. But alas, there are plenty of folk who believe in supernatural agencies, and who therefore have to believe either that earthquakes and meningitis are our own fault - perhaps because we do insufficient amounts of obeying and worshipping to please the gods - or that these evils are somehow for our good. Either excuse is risible.
Such folk, in resisting medical advances, would leave man's sufferings to the tender mercies of the inventor of cancer and earthquakes. But the truth is that the fate and well-being of mankind is our own responsibility, and happily - despite all the turpitude weighed against it - the world contains enough human intelligence and kindness to offer fragments of hope for the future. In promising to cure some of the most dreadful afflictions we or those we love might suffer, stem cell research stands high among those hopes.
