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tlb
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 4763
Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:34 am
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Here are some posts from the author on the Beowulf Code: runsforcelery wrote:People, I have deliberately structured this problem so that neither side is completely right nor completely wrong, at least in its first principles.
Beowulf confronted and dealt with an unimaginable nightmare on Old Earth after the Final War, and it was unimaginable for more reasons than simply the horror of the weapons — and the genetic engineering — which had been unleashed. It was unimaginable because this was the birthplace of mankind. Old Earth had — and in many ways, despite the Solarian League's hubris and arrogance, retains, even in Honor's time — a unique reverence in the eyes of the human-explored galaxy. It's where they all came from, the one genuine touchstone every single human being has in common.
And Old Earth damned near didn't make it, even with Beowulf and all of the other colonized star systems which could get there rallying to its assistance. The Final War was that close to a genuine extinction event.
In the wake of the Final War, the Beowulf Code was promulgated for Beowulf; it was later adopted by the League as a whole, but initially, it governed only Beowulf's life sciences. And the primary purpose of the Beowulf Code (as originally promulgated) was to prevent any future weaponization of genetic engineering. It was not to outlaw all genetic modification. It was not to foreclose the individual choices of individuals for individuals. It did specifically outlaw the weaponization of nanotech and what we might think of as biological agents, whether organic or inorganic. In so far as modification of the human genotype was concerned, its sole original intent was to prevent the conscious design of classes of individuals who could/would be the next Scrags on steroids and regard themselves as genetically — i.e., racially — superior to the rest of the human race, thus justifying their place as the predators at the apex of the food chain.
This quickly came to be interpreted as tight restrictions on genetic modification intended to create deliberately "improved" (interpreted as "superior") human beings, even on the individual level. And it was accompanied by the beginnings of a general prejudice against all "genies" because, after all, the "super soldiers" who'd done their best to destroy the unmodified human race (and the entire planet of old Earth) had been "genies," hadn't they? Therefore, all genies were suspect, particularly if there genetic mods did make them demonstrably superior to "base model" humans in some way. (For example, the greater strength and quicker reflexes of the Meyerdahl mods.)
Leonard Detweiler was part of the teams that saved Old Earth. He had no problem at all with restrictions that prevented the future weaponization of biotech in general or genetics in specific. But he saw the "all genies are evil" mindset beginning to set in, and he opposed it. As he saw it, the more repressive interpretations of the Beowulf Code coming into play were akin to people who would have said "Because atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all future nuclear research must be prohibited for all time," thus precluding nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, etc., etc. That was what he railed against, and I would submit that he was right to do so even while Beowulf was right to be concerned about the consequences of the Final War.
The debate between Detweiler and the medical establishment of Beowulf began as a debate between Detweiler and the more radical elements of the medical establishment of Beowulf who most strongly opposed "genetic tampering" after the Final War. As the full awareness of how hideous the Final War had been sank into the general public, the person-in-the-street tended to support those radical elements, which was one of the big reasons why the tide of anti-genie prejudice gathered so much strength in a relatively short stretch of time. And as the person-in-the-street got more extreme in anti-improvement terms, so did the "mainstream" medical establishment. What I'm saying here is that the initial starting positions of Detweiler and someone like George Benson were not that far apart, but the wedge between them was driven deeper and deeper by intolerance and fear, on one side, and bitter resentment of the towering wave of uninformed intolerance and fear, on the other side. Positions became steadily more extreme and the rhetoric grew increasingly heated.
By Honor Harrington's time, the prejudice against genies in general is very much a thing of the past for the vast majority of the human race. There are still some segments of it which continue to think even the Meyerdahl mods were a terrible idea, but they are very few and far between. There is a much more general prejudice against genetic slaves, which is deeply irrational (as, indeed, most bigotry is) and tends to focus more on feelings of superiority on the part of the person who, after all, wasn't designed as property and therefore must be inferior. Anti-genie prejudice as fear of the genetically modified is only a minor strand of public opinion in Honor's day.
For many people, that changes the instant that "genetic modification" becomes defined as "genetic enhancement" — i.e., the creation of a superior human rather than simply one modified to fit a particular environment (a.k.a. the Meyerdahl mods, for example). By and large, however, it's not a big thing.
At the time that Leonard decamped to Mesa, however, it had become a very big thing, and as far as he was concerned the "hysterical fear" of the responsible modification of the human genotype was on the wrong side of history. The debate had turned into a battle to submission from both sides as the positions became ever more extreme, and so when Mesa became available, Detweiler opted to withdraw from Beowulf to a fresh start in an entirely different star system. In effect, he had been driven from the public debate in Beowulf which had left possession of the Beowulf Code to the "fundamentalists" who demanded extremely tight restrictions on genetic modification and who anathematized the concept of intentional genetic uplift.
Leonard's own views had become more extreme over the years of fighting his losing battle against strident voices which wanted only to silence him and those who shared his viewpoint and drive them out of the debate. (I would point out that I created the conceptual basis for Detweiler and the origin of the Mesan Alignment twenty-odd years ago, before the tendency for people to silence opponents and damn the First Amendment had become as prevalent as it is today, but there are definite resonances here.) He'd also become an extremely bitter man, where all things Beowulfan — and especially where the evolving Beowulf Code — was concerned. He never lost his own sense of medical ethics, however. He genuinely had no intention of supplanting humanity with a new, superior species (or at least subspecies. He envisioned a eugenics program designed to uplift all members of a population with the effects of each beneficial modification being spread through the population as a whole through the natural process of reproduction.
The strident (I would argue in many ways the perverted) version of the Beowulf Code which governed at the time that he left for Mesa shouted down even that concept, however. And so, since he and his had been declared "outlaws" anyway, he embraced the outlaw label by designing workers, colonists, and "indentured servants." As I've said elsewhere, one of his main goals in doing this — indeed, the primary goal in doing it — was a continuation of his research and the very quiet, in formal beginning of the GMA later discovered by Mike Henke. He and his fellow Mesans would look to the gradual genetic improvement of the human race, but they would do it in a way which kept the modifications they were making below the radar horizon of the rest of the human race and its blinkered prejudice.
Leonard died before the institution of genetic slavery spread across the galaxy. Manpower Inc. was created by elements of the genuine lunatic fringe which had attached itself to his party. I believe I've spoken about them in a previous post. These were the people who were the neo-Nazis or the Islamic fundamentalists or the anti-fa fanatics who saw in him the closest thing to a "respectable" spokesperson they could find. They didn't think he went anywhere near far enough; he just went farther than any other public figure with a chance to be heard. It wasn't a difficult step for those people to support the design and sale of genetic slaves, and once they had taken that first step they were on a very, very slippery slope into a pit of moral depravity.
The emergence of genetic slavery, and the defiance of interests on Mesa who supported it, continued and intensified the shifting focus of hostility. Genetic slavery "proved" to current Beowulfers that their ancestors had obviously been right to exile Detweiler and the people so corrupt they'd created genetic slavery. Beowulfan contempt for Mesa — and ongoing, almost knee-jerk condemnation of Detweiler and all things associated with him — fueled the growth of the Onion with in the quiet, more benign campaign of genetic uplift Leonard had been associated with. And along the way, Leonard's descendants — or some of them, at any rate — fully embraced the extremists and joined the Onion, where, of course, their family pedigree quickly led them to leadership roles.
Meanwhile, the Beowulf Code ossified for a century or so. Then, gradually, it began to relax. The memory of the Final War receded and gained historical perspective. It penetrated the psyche that there were millions upon millions of "genetically enhanced" human beings (like the entire population of star systems like Meyerdahl) who weren't running around eating the rest of humanity. And as a result, some of the accretions of prejudice and fear got sandblasted off the Beowulf Code. In fact, the geneticists on Beowulf currently have a rather more liberal interpretation of the Beowulf Code than the Solarian League's legal system, which was written on the basis of the ossified version of it.
What this means is that the vast majority of Beowulfers would be perfectly fine with the GMA's objectives. The GMA could have come out of the shadows 150 or 200 years ago, as far as Beowulf was concerned, but not as far as the Solarian League's law codes and a sizable chunk of non-Beowulfan public opinion was concerned. By that time, however, the Onion was already launched on the trajectory of the "Detweiler Plan." And, by that time, the Onion had moved light-years beyond anything Leonard Detweiler could possibly have sanctioned. There's a reason the Onion keeps talking about alpha-lines and beta-lines and gamma-lines, which Leonard would never have done. In effect, the Onion truly is trying to create the one thing the Beowulf Code is specifically designed to prevent: the creation of a recognized social hierarchy based upon genotype.
It's a messy, messy situation, which was specifically intended to be a messy, messy situation, and it really is time that Beowulf did a little soul-searching, at least in historical terms, if it truly wants to understand what's happened here. There's a reason I have Honor reflect that the two things human beings make are tools and mistakes, because although she doesn't realize the irony at the moment that she thinks that, that's precisely what's happened here.
Nobody has ever managed to repeal the law of unintended consequences, and the fact that they can't is really the point I've been trying to make, in a lot of ways.
UH Spoiler Harrington family historyrunsforcelery wrote:The Grayson mods would not have violated neither the spirit nor the wording of the Beowulf Code where the nature of and motive for the mods are concerned. The Graysons confronted one of those "modded to live in their planetary environment" situations the Code specifically and clearly permits. Moreover, there was no way they could have withdrawn their population from their environment, so unless Beowulf wants to be Janeway and worry about whether or not preventing an industrial accident that wipes out an entire star system would constitute "interfering in their development"  (I know; the writers' fault, not Mulgrew's), it's kind of a no-brainer from the morality and ethics side of the equation. Where the Code might have had a problem is that the majority of those who received the mod weren't told that they had, which definitely violates the "informed consent" aspect of the Code. Everything else was golden by Beowulf standards, however, and Beowulfan bio-ethicists would almost certainly have given them a pass on that one because of the emergency nature of their situation and the mindset of the population in question. And it's worth remembering that Grayson sort of couldn't violate the Code when the modification was actually performed.  The geneticists in question left Old Earth centuries before it was ever formulated and, in fact, performed their mods only 13 years after the Final War began, whereas the Code's prohibition on designed uplift weren't formulated until well after the war ended. There was thus no Code for them to violate . . . and even if there had been, they couldn't have known a thing about it! As for changing your child's eye color or making her stronger or smarter, the Code doesn't prohibit that, either. It prohibits, specifically: (a) the inclusion of synthetic or non-human DNA in a genetic mod; (b) modification without the informed consent of the "owner" of the genotype/DNA being modded (that is, somatic mods of almost any sort are totally acceptable and germ-level mods of children who have not yet been conceived are up to whoever provides the sperm and the ova), which is where the Grayson geneticists would be on shaky ground by Honor's day; (c) any eugenics program designed specifically to create an "improved humanity," other than with allowable modifications --- that is, no synthetics, no nonhuman genetic material -- made on an individual, case-by-case basis (that is, no "we're going to design the next stage of the human race and apply it across the board" mods but if individual parent(s) want to make sure their kid is smarter, stronger, etc., than they were and no prohibited material is involved, go for it); (d) any weaponized use of genetic modification (doesn't apply to individuals who end up with faster reflexes, greater strength, etc., even though those sorts of mods obviously have combat implications); (e) any modification which the geneticist knows will have negative consequences for the health of whoever receives it, whether they want it or not (this is the equivalent of the old Hippocratic "First, do no harm" proviso and would cover things like a weight-losing mod that would produce the genetic equivalent of anorexia or bulimia). There's a bunch of minor stuff running around in the weeds of the Code, focused around things like physician responsibility, but those are the major provisions that deal with something like the Alignment. Point (c) is the biggie, of course, and as I've said before, it stems from two different but related concerns. (1) There was no way the Code's originators wanted to risk a reprise of the "super-soldier" madness which had devastated Old Earth [obviously also a factor in point (d)]. (2) There was no way they wanted to see "racism" in the form of quantifiably differentiated genetic groups would be defined as "superior" or "inferior." (That sort of thinking, on the part of the super-soldiers, had also been a major factor in the causes of the Final War.) Manpower has been in flagrant violation of the Code from the day it was founded, and genetic slavery is unspeakably abhorrent to Beowulfan geneticists. What the Alignment is up to would probably be marginally less abhorrent to them, but would remain far beyond the pale.
Genetic engineering |
