Narcissism and Cloning

The "news" put out by the bizarre Raelian sect that they have produced a human clone, true or not, has forced us to think again about the dangers of cloning. Most of the media is only concerned about the potential physical defects of a cloned offspring, given the many failed attempts to clone animals. Unfortunately, the popular press has not considered at all the psychological turmoil with which a human clone would have to live. In addition to the popular press, the normally renegade and overwhelmingly techno-libertarian blogosphere has not seen fit to examine the issue carefully either. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is symptomatic of this failure, for just yesterday he claimed to have not heard any arguments against cloning beyond "it gives people the willies."

Apparently the esteemed leader of the blog world has never read the President's Council Report on cloning which contains some of the most thoughtful arguments against cloning.

That report argues, among many other things, that cloning implies the tyranny of one generation over the next. Sexual generation (even in vitro fertilization) does not allow the parents to control the genetics of the offspring. This puts limits on parenthood and the control that one generation has over the next. Sexual generation leaves the next generation open-ended and free in a way that cloning does not.

Cloning also mucks up family relations in other ways. For example, what will Daddy think when he sees a teenaged Mommy again? This is just one instance of how generational boundaries would be potentially breached or certainly strained by cloning.

Unlike narcissistic parents who would clone themselves, we should try to put ourselves in the position of a child who is the exact genetic duplicate of a parent -- or any other adult. Wouldn't we feel doomed or burdened to repeat the same life and cheated out of our own individuality? What if it weren't a parent? Clearly, if cloning became possible without risk of physical damage and generally acceptable, there would be significant desire to clone great athletes, musicians, etc.... What kind of burden would we be putting on Michael Jordan's clone? A twin is not the same thing, because a twin hasn't lived a life against which another twin will be measured; by definition, there is no generational difference between twins. It is the combination of genetic identicalness and generational difference of cloning that creates so many potential psychological and family problems. Adults who are willing to subject a child to this kind of psychological turmoil for the sake of their narcissism clearly don't deserve to be parents.

The more one thinks in psychological terms, the more one realizes that the burden is not so much on opponents of cloning to show what is wrong with it. The burden is on the defenders of it to show how it doesn't harm the offspring by robbing it of its individualism and its uniqueness. The techno-libertarianism so prevalent in the blogosphere is ostensibly about freedom. But what about the freedom of the clone? Or doesn't that count?