This weekend’s New York Times brought the interesting story of AquaBounty’s genetically modified salmon, which are genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as normal Salmon.
To make a long story short, they first applied to the FDA for approval to sell the product in 1993, and to this day the FDA is still soliciting comments. Jonathan Haidt portrays conservatives as having a stronger “purity” focus than people on the Left. I think this is a counter-example.
A friend of mine once commented that many liberals’ environmentalism was not about preserving the environment, it was about making people suffer. Because suffering purifies you. His prediction was that as we come up with technological solutions to environmental or other liberal points of concern, liberals would eschew them in favor of suffering.
Agreed. This is my favorite example of the “purity” instinct in liberals:
http://boingboing.net/2009/08/31/crazy-organic-bread-.html
I saw Haidt in a video in which he used this very example. The topic regarded the Right’s apparent refusal to acknowledge scientific truths (e.g., evolution, climate change). Haidt showed that the Left has their own anti-scientific biases as well, as exemplified by GM foods and the idea that all races and genders are equal (except, obviously, in skin color or genitalia).
I think both sides use the divinity/impurity axis, they just apply it to different categories, like the above commenters have noted.
Locavorism and environmentalism are the two most obvious examples, but I think collective action itself is treated with the same white gloves.
I think we could easily justify the precautionary principle, especially in this case, without recourse to a purity concern. The FDA approval process has been held up over questions of environmental impact; these questions stem from the primary feature of AquAdvantage salmon: they grow quicker because they do not grow seasonally but throughout the year, reducing the time-to-market by 50%. This may confer a significant fitness advantage.
If the salmon had a significant potential to impact wild populations, the liabilities could easily outstrip the ability of AquaBounty to pay. Given that AquaBounty could have easily (unintentionally) damaged other’s rights and been unable to provide a corrective, it stands that they could not be allowed to act until either the product was demonstrably safe or a process for dismissing concerns over adequate remediation had been satisfied. That gives us the basic outline of a precautionary principle and probably a path not unlike the one which has actually been traced.
In almost every situation it’s almost easy to invent hypothetical “other’s rights” which can be damaged by innovation.
Unchecked, such proliferation of various rights becomes a highly competitive process in which some people try to control others by declaring own “rights”. Enters Coase: the way to keep the process in check is, for example, for everybody to pay for his/her own “rights”.
Considering the likelihood and the extent of the environmental damage, how much the environmentalists are willing to pay to develop means to protect their fantasies about the world? If the GM salmon is banned, and considering the high nutritional quality of salmon, how much the environmentalists are willing to pay – out of their own pockets – to those people of poor countries, or to the poor of their own countries, who would otherwise benefit from less expensive and more abundant high-protein food?
Coase cuts both ways. How much is AquaBounty willing to pay environmentalists to stop wrecking their business?
True. How much the poor and hungry are willing to pay environmentalists (ethanol interest groups, minimum-wage interest groups etc) to stop wrecking their lives?
The point is not that there should be no review process (though I like the implied idea of allowing them to post a liability bond– which could be raised by a separate capital-raising process– in lieu of review). The point is that it is prima facie ridiculous that any reasonable review process, as opposed to a sequence of spurious stalling tactics, should take *twenty years* to conclude.
The FDA assessment considers the environmental impact of escaped AquaBounty salmon. You can read it here. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AnimalVeterinary/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/GeneticEngineering/GeneticallyEngineeredAnimals/UCM333102.pdf
The AquaBounty fish are not growing faster because of seasonality, but because they thrive under the artificial farm conditions. You might as well worry about escaped farm turkeys affecting the genetics of wild turkeys. The greatest environmental impact of farmed fish, whether AquaBounty or not, is the harvesting of feed fish for farmed salmon.
Much of the environmental left is as emotionally pre-Darwinian as the young earth-Creationist right. Creationists argue that because Genesis says God created various living things “after their own kind,” there has been no major evolution. Chihuahuas and Great Danes have been bred from the same ancestor but they are still of the “kind” dogs. There is no earlier ancestor that could evolve into both dogs and cats. Dogs and cats are separate by God’s plan.
Similarly, lots of environmentalists get weirded out by the idea of taking a gene from one kind of living thing and putting it into another. That creates “frankenfoods.” It defiles Nature. It just isn’t right (like Leon Kass’s “yuck factor”).
I’ve noted before that, for all the claims of secularism from much of the left, they’ve simply replaced the church with another pope and priesthood, ie the President and his bureaucrats, who they place great faith in despite vast evidence that they shouldn’t. Their church is big government and they will mindlessly follow it like any god-fearing churchgoer. “Science” then becomes their religion, which they swing like a cudgel over global warming or evolution- despite not really understanding what science is- but then chuck the cudgel overboard in situations like this, where the science doesn’t support their vague moral intuition that anything that messes with Gaia must be wrong.
There was a time when religion was much more powerful and was a greater force against enlightenment than any govt, but today it is the left and its god of big govt that does more to block the light.