Not What it Seems

Since the Enlightenment our western culture has revered the advances and solutions that science has delivered. It is one of those fields of human endeavour of which we are very proud.

After all, We fought our way up from thinking that all flesh contains the maggots that may crawl out of it from death and that the entire firmament spins about us, the magical centre of the universe to a much more detailed, specific, understood and known set of laws and reasons and consequences. We can make a machine and send it to another planet via a complex set of other machines and operate it from here for years of reseach and images. We can measure things so small that they become unpredictable in their behaviour and so discover another realm of knowledge enticing us forwards, we can split the centre of an atom and power a city with it. In short, we have become wizards. But just like Bod, we also call up things we cannot control.

We introduce Cane Toads to deal with a moth they don't eat, we have no way of dealing with the waste outcomes of splitting atoms, we can clone sheep, but we aren't really sure why we might do that. So we have Wizard Watchers, people versed in the lore of science, and ready to protect the interests of the greater good of humans. We call them ethicists. We trust that they are at the front lines, balancing our powers with our responsibilities, weighing the possible good with the largely unknown dangers, calling upon the broader communities for discussion, awareness, support and concensus.

Oh wait, I obviously strayed into science fiction there for a moment. When was the last time you heard an appeal from an ethicist for debate? Actually can you name an ethicist? Um .... Peter Singer? Is he? Does he count? I don't know.

What I do know, is that when I read a news article this morning about a court granting permission to a 17 year old to remove his breasts after having been on a gender-reassignment hormone treatment since the age of 13 everything seemed to be in order until I came across this quote from the ethicist (I excerpt here from the article, my emphasis added):

'But ethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini said mainstream medicine did not recognise hormone treatments and surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria. He said it was a psychiatric disorder qualifying under American guidelines as a psychosis because "it's a belief out of accordance with reality".
"What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief." he said.'

Well that set off my "danger danger" antenna. My understanding is that psychosis is an extreme level of measure, a non-functional state of mental operation. A level, let us remember for a moment, that was applied in the not-too-distant-past to creative types ( NZ author) and women not deemed suitably compliant or docile by their husbands and used as an excuse for labotomies, elcetric shock torture and extreme confinement. But also, and perhaps more importantly, the way this has been formulated as being abberant in relation to an objective "reality".

So apparently, whenever any of us have an idea or a wish to use our will to make reality different, we're possibly just plan psychotic. A line like this is inviting criticism of everything from hair dye, tattoos, and dressing in BSG costume through to going to university and even the entire field of science itself. Where does Mr Tonti-Filippini intend to draw the line?

What a double whammy. I presumed that if ethicists exist, they would be humanists. It seems this has been naive. It seems also, that Mr Tonti-Filippini would find many of my behaviours and desires to defy existing reality as being aberrant enough to justify the label psychotic and so deprive me of my capacity to contribute to the human endeavour of growth and expansion (in ways that do not simply involve the multiplication of our number) and nested inside that issue is his presumption of an objective "reality". In the words of Dylan Moran, "Why does no one say, let's be realistic, oil me ?" Why is reality presumed to be locked in, ordered, un-changeable?

It is easy enough to discover that much as Alex in the court case identifies as "he", our ethicist actually identifies himself as "Dr Tonti-Filippini, Catholic bio-ethicist". Ahh. A little bit more detail gives a lot more context to that right-wing quote. Of all the versions of this news story promulgated across the various news sites of the interwebs, no one bothered to do any more than repeat the copy and the flaws of the first story filed.

Proving in the end that judges in courts can still make thoughtful, humanist decisions, but we only hear about them through the irritating whine of bigots masquerading as informed specialists and the haze of lazy journalism. We, in the form of science have created from our own efforts amazing tools, but we clog their workings ourselves.

I welcome our robot overlords.