Volume 5, Number 12, January 2007

Quote From Moshe: “<The institution of slavery> allowed the masters <time> to learn, to build, to write and to think. It has taken almost until now before humanity can replace slavery in some form or other by automation, the most perfect slave one can imagine. But this unique opportunity will create more trouble…We shall have to relearn tasks we already know…You need a new caliber of brain which will take something like twenty-five years to form…Unless we learn to think about the things we know in alternative ways, unless we widen and deepend our freedom of choice and use it humanely, the real abolition of slavery will begin as a disaster.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 155

Better People

The advances of science always provide us with a double-edged sword. Our washers and dryers, our refrigerators and microwaves, lead us to excessive ownership of clothes and food, to endless clutter and waste. The prospect of being able to keep a person alive in an indefinite comatose state forces us to make the decision once left to God or fate as to whether our loved ones will live or die. And now, on the horizon, genetic research looms to create perhaps the most troubling of these technological crises.

Anyone who enjoys The Twilight Zone, or who has seen a film like Gattaca knows already to what I am referring. In the future it is not only possible, but likely, that we will have more information about ourselves and our unborn children than we need. It may be possible to target embryos that will become people at a high risk for Alzheimers or cancer. We will then have a choice as to whether we wish to allow these children to come into the world, bringing with them the risk and the cost that they bear.

The moral and ethical questions are dizzying. No one can take the high-ground. In such situations we are left with impossible choices, given more responsibility than we can wisely assume, for once we reduce a person to their potential for disease or defect, we are unable to see ourselves as truly healthy.

Many in the Feldenkrais community see the emergence of The Feldenkrais Method and others like it as a potential sea-change in human existence. Those of us who can afford to be most optimistic can believe that the cultivation of awareness is a kind of evolution for humanity, one that has been progressing for the last twenty-thousand years.

Feldenkrais made distinctions between consciousness and awareness, trying to explain the difference between an animal’s intelligence and ability to learn and interact versus our human potential to alter the nature of our own view of how we relate to the world. We go beyond the simple use of memory and functionality to an actual understanding of it, an awareness of our own process.

When a problem appears unsolvable, the solution usually lies outside the confines of the problem itself, and so cannot be perceived without taking a higher view of the whole situation. I’ve given numerous examples of this kind of thing, where additional information is gained and related to a prior situation to change one’s understanding of how one can interact with it. I count myself among those who believe that many of the dilemmas we face in the world today that seem insurmountable can be overcome when a significant portion of the population are able to cultivate their awareness to a higher degree.

On the other hand, I find the notion of elimination of disease and suffering through cultivation of “perfect embryos” to be a fallacious one. While I greatly favor anything that will provide someone a cure from a disease, I do not believe that preventing such a person from being born is a wise strategy.

Perhaps many diseases are manifestations of the way we are living our lives. If that is so, then the elimination of such telling signs will either create humans that are more capable of living in an unhealthy way, or will provide opportunities for unidentified maladies to come and take the place of the ones we have sidestepped.

While someone with a purely scientific perspective might dismiss any such “poetic” descriptions of disease, I’ve seen enough in my life and in others the inseverability of emotion and thought from physical well-being. We are not merely a battleground of organisms, any more than we are purely emotional beings.

The process of becoming ill and recovering is not a glitch in the pathway of life, but rather is something endemic to being human, and the overcoming of such illness through recognition of the states that bring it about is vital to our creating the kind of life we desire in our world and among our various communities. Whatever gain we may believe can come about by the breeding of the “right kind of humans” will be illusory, as it will deprive us of people who understand illness as a vital state of humanity.

Am I nobly condemning people to face Alzheimers’ for the sake of advertising the Feldenkrais Method? Certainly not. I’m petrified that I or anyone else I know will suffer from that disease. The day a cure is announced I will celebrate and breathe a sigh of relief. But the process of finding that cure, the knowledge we gain by searching for it. All of that knowledge, the whole process, is lost if we delude ourselves that we can create people for whom illness is a non-issue.

What is most frightening to me is that, by selecting “healthier” humans to be born, we will not in fact avoid illness, but simply deceive ourselves into believing that we can. During this period of self-deception we will do great harm to ourselves and others as we split into the genetically proper and improper, those who are unable or unwilling to pay for such knowledge and those who believe they have no choice about making use of it. In the end, such terrors will be seen as largely irrelevant but it will be too late because we have sidestepped the means to gain such a greater understanding of what it means to be human.