It’s pure speculation, of course. And, from a serious historical point of view, one can take issue with some or all of its counterfactual logic. Yet it asks a supremely important question: not the ‘what if?’ that is the premise of the novel, but whether civilisations should ever suppress science and technology. [...]
The conventional wisdom was that the use of sterilisation to eliminate congenital ‘weaknesses’ from the population was a reasonable, indeed progressive, thing to do. There were some experts who had doubts as to the practicality or effectiveness of such measures, but few with moral qualms. The theories were put into action in many countries including that exemplar of social democracy, Sweden – where something like 15,000 people were sterilised as a condition of release from institutions (with a further 5,000 or more sterilised in other coercive circumstances). [...]
The range of traits, both physical and psychological, whose incidence we could interfere with is expanding. Writing for UnHerd this week, Tom Chivers explains just how close we are to making genetic edits to boost IQ. He also suggests that the Chinese government is taking a disturbingly close interest in the technology. [...]
Moreover, the real choice is not between progress and no progress, but between different paths of technological development. That’s because in suppressing one technological path we can open up opportunities along another. For instance, while climate change agreements weaken the case for investment in polluting technologies they have the opposite effect on clean technologies. As restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions have tightened, we’ve seen sustained progress across a range of low carbon technologies including renewables, smart grids, energy storage and electric vehicles.
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