Nobel laureate James Watson and the big liberal tent

Last month, scientist James Watson, who won the Nobel back in 1962 for his work in understanding the Double Helix structure of DNA, was busy apologizing for his remarks that Africans are less intelligent than other folks. Undercover Black Man reports this isn't even the first time this year the 79-year-old has been compelled to backpedal and apologize for offensive comments. Actually, he's got the sexism, homophobia and ableism going just as good as the racism, as noted in a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson:

In 2003, Watson spoke in favor of genetic selection to eliminate ugly women: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." In 2000, he suggested that people with darker skin have stronger libidos. In 1997, Watson contended that parents should be allowed to abort fetuses they found to be gay: "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her." In the same interview, he said, "We already accept that most couples don't want a Down child. You would have to be crazy to say you wanted one, because that child has no future."

So let's just look at Watson for a moment. He's Mr. DNA. He was the head of the Human Genome Project, the mapping of our genes to determine which genes cause which traits, variations and health conditions. He's the guy who was in charge of discovering the most basic information about how human beings differ from one another. And his opinions about those differences? Africans lack intelligence, girls should be designed to be pretty, dark-skinned folk can't keep their pants zipped, and there's no problem or social loss to identifying and eliminating gay people and those with Down Syndrome before they're ever born.

These ideas Watson has about whose genes are good and whose are inherently bad are not random and unconnected. And I suspect it's also no coincidence that everything he's not (African, female, gay, developmentally disabled) falls short of being equal or worthy.

Gerson notes:

Watson is not typical of the scientific community when it comes to his extreme social application of genetics. But this controversy illustrates a temptation within science -- and a tension between some scientific views and liberalism.

The temptation is eugenics. Watson is correct that "we already accept" genetic screening and selective breeding when it comes to disabled children. About 90 percent of fetuses found to have Down syndrome are aborted in America. According to a recent study, about 40 percent of unborn children in Europe with one of 11 congenital defects don't make it to birth.

I don't know exactly how atypical Watson's beliefs are, but they're not as rare as Gerson indicates -- especially with regard to Down Syndrome and abortion. Gerson continues:

No one should underestimate the wrenching challenge of having a disabled child. But we also should not ignore the social consequences of widespread screening of children for "desirable" traits. This kind of "choice" is actually a form of absolute power of one generation over the next -- the power to forever define what is "normal," "straight" and "beautiful." And it leads inevitably to discrimination. British scientist Robert Edwards has argued, "Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease." A sin. Which leaves disabled children who escape the net of screening -- the result of parental sin -- to be born into a new form of bastardy and prejudice.

This creates an inevitable tension within liberalism. The left in America positions itself as both the defender of egalitarianism and of unrestricted science. In the last presidential election, Sen. John Kerry pledged to "tear down every wall" that inhibited medical research. But what happens when certain scientific views lead to an erosion of the ideal of equality? Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rising academic analyst of these trends, argues: "Watson is anti-egalitarian in the extreme. Science looks at human beings in their animal aspects. As animals, we are not always equal. It is precisely in the ways we are not simply animals that we are equal. So science, left to itself, poses a serious challenge to egalitarianism."

"The left," Levin continues, "finds itself increasingly disarmed against this challenge, as it grows increasingly uncomfortable with the necessarily transcendent basis of human equality. Part of the case for egalitarianism relies on the assertion of something beyond our animal nature crudely understood, and of a standard science alone will not provide. Defending equality requires tools the left used to possess but seems to have less and less of."

Gerson apparently equates science with liberalism, and that correlation would be an interesting side debate, I suppose, though Watson certainly isn't sitting at the same progressive campfire as I am. Given his record, lets not pretend that Watson holds the liberal view of egalitarianism in any special esteem. Why does Gerson focus his criticism on liberalism? Possibly because the prejudices of the right are usually obfuscated by the anti-choice stance that does appear to accept developmental disability (and gayness and race) as part of the glorious diversity of human life, until it comes to funding things like special education or Head Start. Prejudices on the left can be seen as simple hypocrisy, something much easier to point a finger at.

Gerson says the "temptation of eugenics" involves a reductionism of individual human value into the tangible or quantifiable. While his point is an important one, and one I find especially important as a disabled feminist, he's reductionist himself in the way he shrinks the messy real-world issues of reproductive justice and choice for women into wobbly liberalism. And using Watson and his history of both scientific excellence and ideological bigotry to batter science and liberalism together is a cheap partisan strategy that fails to support the very people he criticizes Watson for devaluing.

h/t to Justice for All