As a genetic counselor who often saw the sad devastation of families coping with children who had debilitating genetic conditions I became very sympathetic to those prospective parents making the choice to avoid a lifetime of pain. Those who oppose IVF for religious or moral reasons should imagine themselves saddled with a lifetime of childcare for a kid with no chance of any real development. The depression I saw in those parents with such children touched me deeply.
Happily, I also helped some who attempted to avoid such burdens by choosing which embryos to implant through IVF technology. Sometimes they were trying avoid having children with genetic mutations that would cause a child to live only a few years, with apparently normal development, followed by an inevitable and terrible decline. To deny this option to others on some intellectually fussy notion of spirituality or morality seems to me itself grossly immoral.
Thank you, Noah, great piece. I am also really grateful for the link to your piece on clinical depression.
I don't have clinical depression, am nowhere near the level of "being staked out in the middle of a burning desert with a spear through your chest pinning you to the ground, with your eyelids cut off, staring up at the burning sun...forever.", but I have been struggling for months now.
My own personal narrative (per the article) has always been positive, but in less than a year, I've seen the sudden and shocking deaths of both my brother and father, as well as two close friends. I've never experienced grief anything like i,t and it comes in waves.
The similarities to how you speak about depression are strong for me, particularly moments hitting me where I just feel that numbness, where my get-up-and-go has got up and went. I've always been a high-energy person full of purpose and drive, but when this hits me, I just don't feel like doing anything.
What does help, and I very much agree with you, is meeting with people and talking about anything at all. I tend to be someone people come to so I can listen with them and help them talk through knotty problems (often business, career etc), so that helps them and me, plus restores my (lost in these depressive moments) sense of purpose.
He didn’t have a heart condition: he, at birth, had a high chance of heart condition. But there was nothing “wrong” with his heart, he just wasn’t as aerobically fit as those that were genetically selected. And yes, he should have washed out. At least he didn’t “save the day” - he just achieved what he proposed to himself to achieve in spite of everything (egotistical yes, but if we are to believe the move, he was discriminated against and unable to prove his worth otherwise)
The movie was a favorite of mine for many years because “there is no gene for human spirit”. That message deeply moved me and looking back I can honestly say “I never saved anything for swim back”. I still enjoy the move and think of it very fondly and the esthetics are just fabulous to me to this day. But the movie itself is a mess and the motivations for it (which you can more clearly see in the deleted scenes) are a mess - and such misguided motivations are what Noah is directly addressing in this post.
I mean, I'm not sure I'd say "wrong" even if I take your (and Noah's) point. The movie isn't saying AHHH EUGENICS so much as it's saying that once you move towards an ideal of perfect babies, it's inevitable that you'll start to discriminate against the imperfect ones.
I enjoyed this article when it came out, and I like it again. But in the current context, I’m afraid I can’t agree. There are lots of merely emotional reasons not to like the technology Noor is making, or other similar solutions, but there are also principled reasons that have nothing to do with valorizing suffering as such. As a Catholic, I think IVF is intrinsically evil because of the way it interrupts the sex act. That’s a discussion I’d love to have elsewhere, but it’s relevant because this technology can’t help using IVF. It’s a classic principle that you can’t do evil that good may come of it. The alleviation of suffering shouldn’t supplant other goods, like respect for the intrinsic characteristics of human nature and dignity. I suspect we disagree on those characteristics, but surely we can agree that not every criticism of a technology’s potential for good is necessarily based on being pro-suffering? Big fish suffocate in shallow water, and human nature is a pretty big fish.
That's the problem with religion ain't it; first they're all 'Go forth and multiply', and you literally have to promise for the eyes of God and the community that as a married couple you'll make babies and raise them as good Christians. Then they're all 'gays can't marry because they can't make them babies'. 'Contraception is bad, because more babies'. 'Abortion? Evil!' Etc etc. And then, when everybody has been well indoctrinated that the only good way to live your life is to make those friggin babies, they go and say 'oh yeah, but not like that'... All those couples who have been trying for years, with increasing sadness and despair for not having children, and for being incomplete humans and bad Christians, and probably a lot of prayers and group prayers and sham remedies, because the priest says they should really make them babies, and then you don't allow them the fix. This anti IVF stance has nothing to do with good and evil, and everything with a Catholic church that wishes to control the live of their followers, and especially their sex life. You really can't defend that 'it's not about being pro-suffering', because suffering is an integral aspect of Christian doctrine (think of Jesus on the cross), to such an extent that 'mortification of the flesh' is promoted as something you really ought to try. And priests, nuns, monks, etc are made to suffer for their entire life through the rejection of sex...
Nailed it. We grew up Catholic but these wildly inconsistent and straight up hand-wavy illogical arguments just make such little sense in the modern world that we switched and got married in the Episcopal church instead, which is a far more logical, kind, and accepting place than the Catholic church. Any church that argues you must forgo technologies like IVF and necessitate that babies should be born with otherwise avoidable life-long and debilitating diseases or genetic abnormalities (thus condemning them to a life of suffering and pain that was otherwise avoidable) is a church that very, very, VERY few people in this day and age will be morally comfortable with supporting. All of that on top of the hypocritical nature that was exposed after the abuse scandals came out, and it's no surprise that they have a very real identity crisis and you see mass defections away from the Catholic church.
I understand that. But if you think an action can be evil regardless of how good your intentions are, and if you think IVF is such an action, then not even the legitimate and noble desire to have children can justify it. You may disagree with either of those statements, but that’s the core of the Catholic understanding of the issue.
You have it backwards. The technology does not use IVF; it is a response to the existence of IVF. Once IVF creates a number of embryos for a couple who carry a genetic defect, without Orchid, selection among the embryos would be random; those not selected are never born and, eventually destroyed. Orchid removes that element of randomness. What you object to is favoring embryos without the genetic defect over those that have the defect. Your instincts may be telling you that all of those embryos should be brought to term, but that would never happen.
I certainly prefer this to pure IVF, with the randomness and the destruction of the other embryos, but as I understand it, this still involves artificially fertilizing the egg and implanting it into the uterus. It’s the whole mechanics of implanting an embryo at all that I have a problem, not the supposed eugenic undertone.
So you aren’t against the sperm fertilizing the egg in a test tube, but are against the implantation of the resulting embryo without the holy act of intercourse? If the lab workers injected that embryo into the father’s gonads, and he then inserted it into the wife’s (I assume it is also critical that they actually be sacramentally married also, at a church, performed in Latin) uterus using the traditional act, and thereby implanting it then it would pass your good vs evil checklist?
I remember when the Catholic Church refused to let starving Europeans eat the newly discovered new world potato because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible and thus evil. Making moral judgements based on ancient texts written before much of anything was yet discovered leads to much trouble.
I posted a polite and civil comment on a worthwhile piece of writing with which I disagree. If you disagree with my positions, you could at least strive for a comparable modicum of civility and politeness. Making moral judgments based on simplistic history and evidently no meaningful familiarity with an ongoing philosophical and theological tradition leads to much trouble, too.
It interrupts the sex act by fertilizing an egg in a lab, not in the womb. It matters because the physical sex act, as understood by the Church, is always an expression of the mutual self-gift which husband and wife vow to make to each other, not just sexually, but in every aspect of their life as a couple. So, yes, in a way, my concern is based on the conviction that there is an inherent holiness to the physical sex act, although the explanation for that holiness is rooted as much in classical philosophy as in Scripture. (Organic actions have purposes, etc.)
I would clarify, though, that the Church doesn't teach that simply not having children is blasphemous or in any other way sinful. Otherwise, infertile couples would be sinning every time they have sex. The Church only teaches that the couple must be *open* to the possibility of conception in the womb every time they have sex, which is why it doesn't allow contraception or IVF.
Only someone who does not know the pain and suffering of genetic disease would claim the treatment (changing the genes) is immoral. CRISPR is already modifying living humans. We already have GMO people. My sister would be dead without it. So, it's very hard for me to take these complaints seriously. "Yes your sister would be dead, but I would feel less scared about a potential dystopia, so please let her die for my lack of courage."
An excellent post. I've been thinking about this in a similar manner when it comes to many progressive arguments and how they're often fundamentally incompatible with progress in society. I've always been a Democrat for the most part, but an FDR/JFK/Obama like Democrat, most certainly not a progressive, and these loud progressive voices frequently seem to exhibit crab-bucket syndrome within the party, dragging Democrats (and their national success) down with them.
I could basically just link to Noah's 2024 Election Retrospective/Postmortem on all the reasons why Democrats got blown out, and that would cover 99% of my perspective on things and why the party is facing such unpopularity. They've allowed this faction to successfully taint the rest of the party, and given how unpopular these perspectives often are nationally, it dooms the party as a whole unless they find a way to successfully distance themselves from it. To the country as a whole, the devil they know (the Republicans) is the safer bet than the one they don't with these ideas. The rampant NIMBYism, the dysfunctional, high-crime, and fiscally insolvent Democrat cities, unchecked illegal immigration, the excessive pushing of trans ideologies, etc.
The topic of this post puts in in a very clear light though of just how obstructionist these progressive perspectives are: we can't have new and abundant housing/transit because that would be gentrification/environmental destruction/neighborhood character destruction (take your nonsensical pick), we can't have strict immigration controls because that is a hard border between the haves and the have nots in poorer countries, we can't have strong police and criminal prosecution because that is waging war on poor/minorities, we can't have pro-business/entrepreneur tax environments because that's subsidizing shareholders, we must have strict DEI hiring quotas rather than being merit-based otherwise we're racist, we can't have IVF to avoid disease and deformity because it's eugenics, we must subsidize public sector unions and absurd pensions to the detriment of all taxpayers, we can't have AI and automation so we can artificially extended employment of dead end or dangerous jobs, and so on and so forth, there's a million additional examples I'm sure, but the point is they're all nonsensical arguments that fall apart with even the slightest bit of fact-based analysis.
That John Adam's quote is truly prescient, but I'm sure he'd be dismayed to find out that there are people in 2025 that are now arguing *against* progress simply for weird, ideological, and logically inconsistent reasons. One online creator I follow put it perfectly, the types of people who fall into this progressive camp are usually white, extremely privileged people who have not faced a single day of hardship in their entire life, and thus they have internalized guilt as a result so they're constantly running around looking for a cross to nail themselves up on.
Enjoyed the re-post. I recall reading it last year. Somewhere in here, it tugs at my favorite line from A League of Their Own:
“It’s supposed to be hard. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
Perhaps it’s in your statement that happiness can be a different kind of depth, so that conquering the ills that challenged us before, addressing the ones that challenge us now, redefine what happiness can be and how we measure its depth. Perhaps also redefines the nobility of a life well-lived.
Absence of suffering might require us to find and explore new ways to hone our edge. But we’re a long way from eliminating all suffering.
We will never eliminate suffering -- it's built into the human condition. The dynamics of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies still exist today, hundreds and thousands of years later. Yes, in some ways life improves and suffering decreases -- but as long as we have psyches, we will suffer, regardless of material conditions.
I see myself as a romantic modernist, which means I share with you the gratitude for modern technology and its incredible successes. I pay for a subscription not only because you educate me about contemporary economics but also because you articulate some of the best things about modernity in general.
I don’t want to argue about this particular technology, but about what I perceive to be the shallow, childish, and more importantly—inaccurate—vision of Nature that underlies it. For you, Nature seems to be ONLY a Big Bad Wolf at the door, a fairy-tale monster to be conquered—its body chopped up by Woodsmen for fodder. I believe one of your more “philosophical” posts is pretty explicit about this vision.
It’s a terribly limited vision, one that seems to have absolutely no sense of the web of life that sustains us (i.e. modern ecology). I’ve read many statistical charts in your writing, but I don’t remember you citing the charts that enumerate the loss of habitat and the extinction of species that modern world is wrecking on our planet. Nor do I remember you ever facing up to what this might mean for the vision of Nature embedded in your technological optimism.
Besides having a very limited sense of the ironies in our technological prowess, the way they boomerang on us to create even further problems, your technological optimism envisions a wholly human world, one where other creatures live only by our leave. It seems to have little sense of the Other in nature or the wonder and respect for the natural forces that have given and continue to give us life.
In the broadest sense, that is, it has no sense of the Sacred. One need not ascribe to any particular religious dogma to feel the profound emptiness and loneliness of this philosophy, not to speak of its hubris that is as old as the hills.
If we want to fight successfully against deeply disturbing, self-destructive, and growing anti-modernist movements, I think we need a bigger sense of Nature—and the demands it makes on us—than what’s on offer here.
Lets all be tall smart and beautiful. With backs that don't hurt joints that don't hurt. That don't have deadly allergies or dyslexia. Or speech impediments.
‘Dark romantics’ is a great term. Very applicable in Western politics these days where Fukuyama’s “last men” seem too restless, status-hungry and angry to simply enjoy life.
I have to admit I’m a dark romantic too, when it comes to raking leaves. As far as I’m concerned, leaf blowers are one of the few true evils of modern life.
I have a hypothesis: Those who have never lived with the care (and the despair) of a child diminished by a genetic handicap will find many high-minded moral reasons to oppose any attempts to remove or reduce the chances of such an outcome. Those who have lived through the experience, and emotionally understand what I'm talking about, are perhaps more likely to think differently.
I had an uncle (great-uncle) who was pretty much the same as your granddad, and used to say the same thing. He was a very decent man, but the war wrecked him.
I wouldn’t change a word of your essay, but one thing jumps out at me: when people like your conservative pundit talk about “facing adversity”, they don’t mean AIDS. They mean WW2 (and my great uncle would have viewed the pundit as every bit as soft and innocent (in a bad way) as the young people the pundit was criticizing. Seeing his sons become the equivalent of infantryman in WW2 was not something he aspired to do).
But there is a big difference between the adversity of war and of childbirth and the adversity of disease. There’s agency and courage in attempting the first two and there’s just passive misfortune in the later. However silly the pundit’s view of war was, he was trying to get at something true- that that KIND of adversity breeds strong people and cultures and has value. More of Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”, I think.
How does this correlate to the more recent ideas about how frictionless societies also end up with these unintended consequences like lower fertility, lower rates of socializing, more loneliness, etc? Or is it like what Noah says here that the cycle will make it so that hardship comes back around? Maybe it already is with the current administration burning down all the progress of the last 50 years? Our children and grandchildren will have to build the world back up.
When people say suffering has benefits, it is true that they're often just trying to console themselves and make the inevitable pain easier to take. On analogy with sour grapes -- "those grapes I can't get are sour" -- we could call this the "medicinal grapes" phenomenon: "these grapes I have to eat are good for me."
However, it doesn't follow that *all* suffering falls into this category. Some forms of it actually *are* good for us. Education is full of examples like this. To struggle with calculus or Russian is to learn those things. The struggle isn't a path to mastery; it is mastery. Doing a difficult job, straining to learn it and improve, sacrificing other things for it -- these aren't methods of getting good at it. They are the getting-good-at-it. You can't filet out the hard stuff.
I'm glad no one has to suffer from polio any more. But if no one has to suffer from boredom, I think humanity will lose more by that "progress" than it will gain.
This is beautifully written Noah.
As a genetic counselor who often saw the sad devastation of families coping with children who had debilitating genetic conditions I became very sympathetic to those prospective parents making the choice to avoid a lifetime of pain. Those who oppose IVF for religious or moral reasons should imagine themselves saddled with a lifetime of childcare for a kid with no chance of any real development. The depression I saw in those parents with such children touched me deeply.
Happily, I also helped some who attempted to avoid such burdens by choosing which embryos to implant through IVF technology. Sometimes they were trying avoid having children with genetic mutations that would cause a child to live only a few years, with apparently normal development, followed by an inevitable and terrible decline. To deny this option to others on some intellectually fussy notion of spirituality or morality seems to me itself grossly immoral.
Thank you, Noah, great piece. I am also really grateful for the link to your piece on clinical depression.
I don't have clinical depression, am nowhere near the level of "being staked out in the middle of a burning desert with a spear through your chest pinning you to the ground, with your eyelids cut off, staring up at the burning sun...forever.", but I have been struggling for months now.
My own personal narrative (per the article) has always been positive, but in less than a year, I've seen the sudden and shocking deaths of both my brother and father, as well as two close friends. I've never experienced grief anything like i,t and it comes in waves.
The similarities to how you speak about depression are strong for me, particularly moments hitting me where I just feel that numbness, where my get-up-and-go has got up and went. I've always been a high-energy person full of purpose and drive, but when this hits me, I just don't feel like doing anything.
What does help, and I very much agree with you, is meeting with people and talking about anything at all. I tend to be someone people come to so I can listen with them and help them talk through knotty problems (often business, career etc), so that helps them and me, plus restores my (lost in these depressive moments) sense of purpose.
Thanks again, deeply appreciated, sir.
So sorry for your losses. May their memories be a blessing.
Anyone ever see Gattaca? Underrated science fiction film from the 90s on this topic!
I sided with Gore Vidal in Gattaca. He should never have gone on theat Saturn mission with his heart condition!
Yeah it’s actually an amusing point. We didn’t need eugenics to have rigorous tests for space flight programs!
He didn’t have a heart condition: he, at birth, had a high chance of heart condition. But there was nothing “wrong” with his heart, he just wasn’t as aerobically fit as those that were genetically selected. And yes, he should have washed out. At least he didn’t “save the day” - he just achieved what he proposed to himself to achieve in spite of everything (egotistical yes, but if we are to believe the move, he was discriminated against and unable to prove his worth otherwise)
The movie was a favorite of mine for many years because “there is no gene for human spirit”. That message deeply moved me and looking back I can honestly say “I never saved anything for swim back”. I still enjoy the move and think of it very fondly and the esthetics are just fabulous to me to this day. But the movie itself is a mess and the motivations for it (which you can more clearly see in the deleted scenes) are a mess - and such misguided motivations are what Noah is directly addressing in this post.
Good film but wrong.
It's good to use technology to eliminate disease.
I mean, I'm not sure I'd say "wrong" even if I take your (and Noah's) point. The movie isn't saying AHHH EUGENICS so much as it's saying that once you move towards an ideal of perfect babies, it's inevitable that you'll start to discriminate against the imperfect ones.
Why is that inevitable.
I don't see why you still wouldn't just treat each person individually
….have you met humans?
We’re a tribal species. We inevitably break people into the in-group and out-group
The last sixty years or so, has shown that we don't have to be broken up by race or ethnicity anymore
It's possible to treat people as individuals.And I think we've made a lot of progress in learning.How to do that
The "in-valids".
I remember that movie.
I enjoyed this article when it came out, and I like it again. But in the current context, I’m afraid I can’t agree. There are lots of merely emotional reasons not to like the technology Noor is making, or other similar solutions, but there are also principled reasons that have nothing to do with valorizing suffering as such. As a Catholic, I think IVF is intrinsically evil because of the way it interrupts the sex act. That’s a discussion I’d love to have elsewhere, but it’s relevant because this technology can’t help using IVF. It’s a classic principle that you can’t do evil that good may come of it. The alleviation of suffering shouldn’t supplant other goods, like respect for the intrinsic characteristics of human nature and dignity. I suspect we disagree on those characteristics, but surely we can agree that not every criticism of a technology’s potential for good is necessarily based on being pro-suffering? Big fish suffocate in shallow water, and human nature is a pretty big fish.
That's the problem with religion ain't it; first they're all 'Go forth and multiply', and you literally have to promise for the eyes of God and the community that as a married couple you'll make babies and raise them as good Christians. Then they're all 'gays can't marry because they can't make them babies'. 'Contraception is bad, because more babies'. 'Abortion? Evil!' Etc etc. And then, when everybody has been well indoctrinated that the only good way to live your life is to make those friggin babies, they go and say 'oh yeah, but not like that'... All those couples who have been trying for years, with increasing sadness and despair for not having children, and for being incomplete humans and bad Christians, and probably a lot of prayers and group prayers and sham remedies, because the priest says they should really make them babies, and then you don't allow them the fix. This anti IVF stance has nothing to do with good and evil, and everything with a Catholic church that wishes to control the live of their followers, and especially their sex life. You really can't defend that 'it's not about being pro-suffering', because suffering is an integral aspect of Christian doctrine (think of Jesus on the cross), to such an extent that 'mortification of the flesh' is promoted as something you really ought to try. And priests, nuns, monks, etc are made to suffer for their entire life through the rejection of sex...
Nailed it. We grew up Catholic but these wildly inconsistent and straight up hand-wavy illogical arguments just make such little sense in the modern world that we switched and got married in the Episcopal church instead, which is a far more logical, kind, and accepting place than the Catholic church. Any church that argues you must forgo technologies like IVF and necessitate that babies should be born with otherwise avoidable life-long and debilitating diseases or genetic abnormalities (thus condemning them to a life of suffering and pain that was otherwise avoidable) is a church that very, very, VERY few people in this day and age will be morally comfortable with supporting. All of that on top of the hypocritical nature that was exposed after the abuse scandals came out, and it's no surprise that they have a very real identity crisis and you see mass defections away from the Catholic church.
Sounds like you’re keen on rational discourse.
People aren't choosing IVF because they want to. They are choosing it because they can't have babies normally.
I understand that. But if you think an action can be evil regardless of how good your intentions are, and if you think IVF is such an action, then not even the legitimate and noble desire to have children can justify it. You may disagree with either of those statements, but that’s the core of the Catholic understanding of the issue.
You have it backwards. The technology does not use IVF; it is a response to the existence of IVF. Once IVF creates a number of embryos for a couple who carry a genetic defect, without Orchid, selection among the embryos would be random; those not selected are never born and, eventually destroyed. Orchid removes that element of randomness. What you object to is favoring embryos without the genetic defect over those that have the defect. Your instincts may be telling you that all of those embryos should be brought to term, but that would never happen.
I certainly prefer this to pure IVF, with the randomness and the destruction of the other embryos, but as I understand it, this still involves artificially fertilizing the egg and implanting it into the uterus. It’s the whole mechanics of implanting an embryo at all that I have a problem, not the supposed eugenic undertone.
So you aren’t against the sperm fertilizing the egg in a test tube, but are against the implantation of the resulting embryo without the holy act of intercourse? If the lab workers injected that embryo into the father’s gonads, and he then inserted it into the wife’s (I assume it is also critical that they actually be sacramentally married also, at a church, performed in Latin) uterus using the traditional act, and thereby implanting it then it would pass your good vs evil checklist?
I remember when the Catholic Church refused to let starving Europeans eat the newly discovered new world potato because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible and thus evil. Making moral judgements based on ancient texts written before much of anything was yet discovered leads to much trouble.
I posted a polite and civil comment on a worthwhile piece of writing with which I disagree. If you disagree with my positions, you could at least strive for a comparable modicum of civility and politeness. Making moral judgments based on simplistic history and evidently no meaningful familiarity with an ongoing philosophical and theological tradition leads to much trouble, too.
How does IVF interrupt the sex act? More importantly why does it matter?
If I understand you correctly, is your concern that the act of sex is itself holy and to have children without that act is blasphemous?
It interrupts the sex act by fertilizing an egg in a lab, not in the womb. It matters because the physical sex act, as understood by the Church, is always an expression of the mutual self-gift which husband and wife vow to make to each other, not just sexually, but in every aspect of their life as a couple. So, yes, in a way, my concern is based on the conviction that there is an inherent holiness to the physical sex act, although the explanation for that holiness is rooted as much in classical philosophy as in Scripture. (Organic actions have purposes, etc.)
I would clarify, though, that the Church doesn't teach that simply not having children is blasphemous or in any other way sinful. Otherwise, infertile couples would be sinning every time they have sex. The Church only teaches that the couple must be *open* to the possibility of conception in the womb every time they have sex, which is why it doesn't allow contraception or IVF.
Only someone who does not know the pain and suffering of genetic disease would claim the treatment (changing the genes) is immoral. CRISPR is already modifying living humans. We already have GMO people. My sister would be dead without it. So, it's very hard for me to take these complaints seriously. "Yes your sister would be dead, but I would feel less scared about a potential dystopia, so please let her die for my lack of courage."
People are quick to dismiss these treatments for others.
Not so quick when the devastation hits their own lives
An excellent post. I've been thinking about this in a similar manner when it comes to many progressive arguments and how they're often fundamentally incompatible with progress in society. I've always been a Democrat for the most part, but an FDR/JFK/Obama like Democrat, most certainly not a progressive, and these loud progressive voices frequently seem to exhibit crab-bucket syndrome within the party, dragging Democrats (and their national success) down with them.
I could basically just link to Noah's 2024 Election Retrospective/Postmortem on all the reasons why Democrats got blown out, and that would cover 99% of my perspective on things and why the party is facing such unpopularity. They've allowed this faction to successfully taint the rest of the party, and given how unpopular these perspectives often are nationally, it dooms the party as a whole unless they find a way to successfully distance themselves from it. To the country as a whole, the devil they know (the Republicans) is the safer bet than the one they don't with these ideas. The rampant NIMBYism, the dysfunctional, high-crime, and fiscally insolvent Democrat cities, unchecked illegal immigration, the excessive pushing of trans ideologies, etc.
The topic of this post puts in in a very clear light though of just how obstructionist these progressive perspectives are: we can't have new and abundant housing/transit because that would be gentrification/environmental destruction/neighborhood character destruction (take your nonsensical pick), we can't have strict immigration controls because that is a hard border between the haves and the have nots in poorer countries, we can't have strong police and criminal prosecution because that is waging war on poor/minorities, we can't have pro-business/entrepreneur tax environments because that's subsidizing shareholders, we must have strict DEI hiring quotas rather than being merit-based otherwise we're racist, we can't have IVF to avoid disease and deformity because it's eugenics, we must subsidize public sector unions and absurd pensions to the detriment of all taxpayers, we can't have AI and automation so we can artificially extended employment of dead end or dangerous jobs, and so on and so forth, there's a million additional examples I'm sure, but the point is they're all nonsensical arguments that fall apart with even the slightest bit of fact-based analysis.
That John Adam's quote is truly prescient, but I'm sure he'd be dismayed to find out that there are people in 2025 that are now arguing *against* progress simply for weird, ideological, and logically inconsistent reasons. One online creator I follow put it perfectly, the types of people who fall into this progressive camp are usually white, extremely privileged people who have not faced a single day of hardship in their entire life, and thus they have internalized guilt as a result so they're constantly running around looking for a cross to nail themselves up on.
Damn what an essay sir. Might get some of these lines tattoed on my skin
Enjoyed the re-post. I recall reading it last year. Somewhere in here, it tugs at my favorite line from A League of Their Own:
“It’s supposed to be hard. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
Perhaps it’s in your statement that happiness can be a different kind of depth, so that conquering the ills that challenged us before, addressing the ones that challenge us now, redefine what happiness can be and how we measure its depth. Perhaps also redefines the nobility of a life well-lived.
Absence of suffering might require us to find and explore new ways to hone our edge. But we’re a long way from eliminating all suffering.
We will never eliminate suffering -- it's built into the human condition. The dynamics of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies still exist today, hundreds and thousands of years later. Yes, in some ways life improves and suffering decreases -- but as long as we have psyches, we will suffer, regardless of material conditions.
I’m so glad to read this post. Thank you.
I see myself as a romantic modernist, which means I share with you the gratitude for modern technology and its incredible successes. I pay for a subscription not only because you educate me about contemporary economics but also because you articulate some of the best things about modernity in general.
I don’t want to argue about this particular technology, but about what I perceive to be the shallow, childish, and more importantly—inaccurate—vision of Nature that underlies it. For you, Nature seems to be ONLY a Big Bad Wolf at the door, a fairy-tale monster to be conquered—its body chopped up by Woodsmen for fodder. I believe one of your more “philosophical” posts is pretty explicit about this vision.
It’s a terribly limited vision, one that seems to have absolutely no sense of the web of life that sustains us (i.e. modern ecology). I’ve read many statistical charts in your writing, but I don’t remember you citing the charts that enumerate the loss of habitat and the extinction of species that modern world is wrecking on our planet. Nor do I remember you ever facing up to what this might mean for the vision of Nature embedded in your technological optimism.
Besides having a very limited sense of the ironies in our technological prowess, the way they boomerang on us to create even further problems, your technological optimism envisions a wholly human world, one where other creatures live only by our leave. It seems to have little sense of the Other in nature or the wonder and respect for the natural forces that have given and continue to give us life.
In the broadest sense, that is, it has no sense of the Sacred. One need not ascribe to any particular religious dogma to feel the profound emptiness and loneliness of this philosophy, not to speak of its hubris that is as old as the hills.
If we want to fight successfully against deeply disturbing, self-destructive, and growing anti-modernist movements, I think we need a bigger sense of Nature—and the demands it makes on us—than what’s on offer here.
I say bring on the designer babies
Lets all be tall smart and beautiful. With backs that don't hurt joints that don't hurt. That don't have deadly allergies or dyslexia. Or speech impediments.
Or any of the many, many other genetic flaws
‘Dark romantics’ is a great term. Very applicable in Western politics these days where Fukuyama’s “last men” seem too restless, status-hungry and angry to simply enjoy life.
I have to admit I’m a dark romantic too, when it comes to raking leaves. As far as I’m concerned, leaf blowers are one of the few true evils of modern life.
Indeed!
I have a hypothesis: Those who have never lived with the care (and the despair) of a child diminished by a genetic handicap will find many high-minded moral reasons to oppose any attempts to remove or reduce the chances of such an outcome. Those who have lived through the experience, and emotionally understand what I'm talking about, are perhaps more likely to think differently.
It’s a terrific essay - thanks for reposting!
I had an uncle (great-uncle) who was pretty much the same as your granddad, and used to say the same thing. He was a very decent man, but the war wrecked him.
I wouldn’t change a word of your essay, but one thing jumps out at me: when people like your conservative pundit talk about “facing adversity”, they don’t mean AIDS. They mean WW2 (and my great uncle would have viewed the pundit as every bit as soft and innocent (in a bad way) as the young people the pundit was criticizing. Seeing his sons become the equivalent of infantryman in WW2 was not something he aspired to do).
But there is a big difference between the adversity of war and of childbirth and the adversity of disease. There’s agency and courage in attempting the first two and there’s just passive misfortune in the later. However silly the pundit’s view of war was, he was trying to get at something true- that that KIND of adversity breeds strong people and cultures and has value. More of Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”, I think.
How does this correlate to the more recent ideas about how frictionless societies also end up with these unintended consequences like lower fertility, lower rates of socializing, more loneliness, etc? Or is it like what Noah says here that the cycle will make it so that hardship comes back around? Maybe it already is with the current administration burning down all the progress of the last 50 years? Our children and grandchildren will have to build the world back up.
When people say suffering has benefits, it is true that they're often just trying to console themselves and make the inevitable pain easier to take. On analogy with sour grapes -- "those grapes I can't get are sour" -- we could call this the "medicinal grapes" phenomenon: "these grapes I have to eat are good for me."
However, it doesn't follow that *all* suffering falls into this category. Some forms of it actually *are* good for us. Education is full of examples like this. To struggle with calculus or Russian is to learn those things. The struggle isn't a path to mastery; it is mastery. Doing a difficult job, straining to learn it and improve, sacrificing other things for it -- these aren't methods of getting good at it. They are the getting-good-at-it. You can't filet out the hard stuff.
I'm glad no one has to suffer from polio any more. But if no one has to suffer from boredom, I think humanity will lose more by that "progress" than it will gain.