As the various pursuits of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. generate pushback from the scientific Left, they draw out distinctions between the two camps’ aims, either to alter humans or to alter what they consume.
The broad goal of any purportedly humanitarian organization, of course, is to alleviate afflictions of disease, isolation, or human suffering, generally. Here, Kennedy and those anti-Kennedy coincide in motive, and soon after diverge on what to target. Much comes down to whether the source of a given affliction is something input to society or something of an undesirable human characteristic — no small difference, practically, so it makes all the more sense that the two are proving themselves to be philosophical opponents.
In many respects, Kennedy’s approach is an effort to promote informed consent. Accusations of conspiracy-theorizing, not all incredible, abound, but he acts in earnest. So far, Kennedy has gone after much of what he promised. He has spoken out against fluoride in drinking water and in favor of a revised nutrition program. Currently, he is directing research on the rise in autism diagnoses. News of measles cases inflames public opinion on Kennedy’s anti-vaccination stance, but then, somewhat surprisingly, he backs the measles vaccine.
This all grates on a society trending toward genetic optimization, open to and uncritical of all sorts of technologies for “hacking humanity.” And before the technological expanse opened up, society had long trended toward seeing humanity as disposable, with widespread acceptance of abortion as a primary example. One led into the other.
The explicit results of such a worldview also lead to contradictions within the opposition’s own camp. Namely, the Left often claims that it is the side of a most sincere humanity — and yet, because of genetic screening and modification, they believe some people are simply unworthy of life. Engineering out genes for blindness, or even for shortness in height, is the goal of an “industrial eugenics” rooted only in the grasp for absolute freedom, and still it persuades a considerable subset of society.
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Intellectual disability is an extremely salient issue in this realm and a chief focus of genetic screening. Especially within the tension of abortion-rights arguments centered on “potential” life and out-of-womb life, the societal value of a disabled human life is uncertain, if often latched onto as charity cases for prominent voices. Actor Colin Farrell’s efforts to advocate people with intellectual disabilities, then, might easily be claimed by the milieu of the Left. A closer look, though, betrays how incompatible his view is with the rest of his celebrity society. His adult son James, who has Angelman syndrome, shapes Farrell’s view that “he’s nothing but a gift.” Farrell even explains his hopes for James to eventually live in a care facility, so that he can have “a bigger life than we can afford him, by having a sense of community.”
Farrell’s hope is not the same as for an impersonal mental institution, nor is it anti-institution. The aim is integration, something which the Left has routinely and tragically dismantled by a limited view of the human good. It’s a yet-unreached system, but to be sure, it is in direct opposition to the “informed avoidance” that animates the pro-eugenics, anti-suspicion subset of people who see MAHA as a tyranny of personal preference. Farrell affirms that he wouldn’t change a thing about his son, and surely anyone rooted in the demands of reality would agree. To do so, though, also makes the precise argument that the existence of a person cannot possibly be a problem. Eugenics, of course, says the opposite. It focuses obsessively on future human modification and demands we ignore the world around us on the way there.