RE: Bioengineering....I’d love opinions on this one.

The opposition to bio-engineering, stem-cell research, etc. is fundamentally moral, and understandably so. But I came across a possible reason that could reverse that, a reason near and dear to conservatives hearts.

Namely, that China, which has no moral compunction about such things, will likely make a bold play to take the global lead in genetic technologies.

Now, from a business standpoint, this could hurt us, but many can say we have no “business” profiting from immorality, and that is that. Fine.

But what about military? Can we afford to forego not just the deterrent ability to kill large numbers of our enemies, but more significantly, the ability to vaccinate ourselves from their growing ability to kill large numbers of us? Analogously, have conservatives been willing to forego anti-missile tech for moral reasons? Quite the opposite. But will we set aside bio-defenses because it is immoral to dabble in such matters?

I brought this up to one conservative friend, and stopped him cold.

Any takers here?

There's a difference between biological warfare and bioengineering. If China is developing bioweaponry then let's nuke the facilities. You lost me on the moral case against defending ourselves against ballistic missiles.

AX

On stopping one conservative friend cold.

Congratulations; you've stopped me cold too ... you're on a run.

Spengler's is a strange rendering, mixing sophistication with silliness to produce a (characteristcally?) perversely seductive argument, which on deeper reflection does not hold together very well, even if it still stimulates.

First of all, in spite of Rosenzweig's brilliant, if too short life, his statement about the coming historic battle between the German speaking countries and the Arabs is, strictly speaking, entirely wrong.

In fact, it was Germany itself, Nazi Germany, with its "pagan 'parody', 'caricature' and 'plagiarism'" of Teutonic tradition, and its attempted replacement of traditional religious expression with worship of the Fuhrer, that ended up fighting practically everyone else, something which Rosenzweig could not have foreseen in 1920, though had he lived until 1933, he may well have had an inkling.

Still, one could argue that it is totalitarianism that Rosenzweig is precisely describing (even if he was wrong about the particulars). Certainly, Rosenzweig (and Spengler) is on firmer ground if one substitutes "Germanic peoples" with "the west". That Islamicist ideology (as opposed to Islam) elides perfectly with totalitarianism of the most vicious kind should be now beyond dispute even without Rosenzweig's "assistance"; nor can it be disputed that Islamicist fanaticism, violence and cynicism have made a caricature of true Islam (though there are those who claim that the fanaticism is a necessary feature of the religion).

So much for Spengler's views that Rosenzweig's warning "pours oil on the fire", for it is a fire that has been burning since at least the Iranian revolution (though obviously for decades before that, as well), and which became a conflagration on September 11, 2001.

Regarding Leo Strauss, since it is the west's battle with totalitarian ideology and structures to which Leo Strauss, having had an intimate knowledge of that struggle in Nazi Germany, devoted his life, to say, as Spengler does, that Strauss is irrevelant to World War IV, is the height of absurdity. For it makes no real sense to distinguish between civilization and religion in the west's battle against a religio-totalitarian ideology where religion and totalitarian ideology are indivisible. (In any event, as seen in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, and reinforced by Mao, Pol Pot, and the two Kims, it is a feature of totalitarian ideologies that they posit their leaders in divine terms, and view the state as the church.)

If, as in radical Islam, a totalitarian entity is buttressed by religious extremism, this hybrid nature makes it all the more toxic. But it is a difference of scale rather than form.

On the other hand, such an obvious hybrid as Islamicism may not be irredeemable, but may, in fact paradoxically, contain the seeds of its own unravelling, as its totalitarian aspect becomes, to adherants of Islam, more clearly antagonistic--and repellant---to the religious principles to which Islamicism is wedded.

The process of unravelling, though, is not necessarily rapid, as evidenced in the distant past by the slow, uneven rates of evolution of religious nation states, where dissent was not tolerated; and more recently by the response of many of Iran's citizens to the repressive mullahcracy under which they've been living for the past 25 years.

If Rosenzweig's views can, by convincingly pointing out the pagan, nihilist tendencies of Islamicism, accelerate the realization that Islam does not necessarily imply a murderous fanaticism and thus wrench Islam from its murderous parody, then far from pouring oil on the flames, he will have performed a valuable service.

If.

Barry:

Britain and by extension America are, or were then, considered Germanic countries. Indeeed, even Churchill at some points expected the future to lie with some alliance of these three "Germanic" nations.