Okay, I’ve probably said a lot of this (if not most of it) someplace else at another time. However:
The Beowulf code does not preclude “genetic uplift.” When a Beowulfan geneticist says that he will “work right up to the limit” of the basic genetic material, what this specifically means is that he will not introduce nonhuman or synthetic genetic material and that he eschews any deliberate effort to produce Homo superior. He doesn’t object to producing people like Honor (who have inherent superior qualities) in order to colonize a planet to which humanity 1.0 is ill adapted, nor does he have a problem with the qualities injected into that individual being added to the gene pool in general. In that instance, however, he is working on a set of genetic modifications, using only human genetic material, to meet a specific environmental challenge. He isn’t setting up a standard, a pattern, a scorecard, whatever you want to call it, which defines a deliberately designed superior being; he’s modifying the basic human genotype into the baseline genotype suited to the environment in which the possessors of that genotype will live.
The Beowulf code is entirely prepared for genetic modification to deal with recognized disease states, and within the limits of the donor genetic material which is combined to create a human being, the Beowulf code is prepared to allow the parents to mitigate what they — the parents — see as undesirable characteristics and to enhance what they — the parents — see as desirable characteristics. There are some mods that a Beowulfan geneticist would not be prepared to perform, whatever the parents desired, however. For example, Beowulf’s experience with the consequences of enhancing human intelligence has indicated that beyond a certain point, the negative personal and societal consequences rapidly begin exceeding the positive ones. Both the Meyerdahl and the Wynton genetic mods included a sort of general intelligence enhancement, but not something that was designed to produce cognitive geniuses or idiot savants. It was, if you will, a generalist enhancement, which still carries what some people would argue are some potentially hefty negative consequences. What happened with Francesca Simoes is an example of the sort of direct, immediate, severely negative consequences Beowulf is unprepared to risk in the pursuit of greater — or more "targeted" — intellectual improvement. There are are bunches and bunches of less immediately negative consequences which have been well documented, not simply on Beowulf but in other places in the galaxy’s medical literature. The Alignment is prepared to accept those negative consequences in order to enhance specific desired consequences, and to cull dramatic failures (like Francesca) or entire lines (as almost happened to the Bardasano line) if it proves less than satisfactory or dangerously unreliable (to the Alignment and its purposes). At the same time, the Alignment is prepared to tolerate highly negative consequences — like a taste for sadism slaked using genetic slaves — if that seems advantageous to its purposes. This means, on the one hand, that the Alignment is prepared to “throw away” its mistakes, whereas Beowulf argues that medical ethics preclude the pursuit of a desired outcome at the likely cost of being compelled to decide to cull an individual or an entire line of individuals. On the other hand, the Alignment is prepared to build in negatives in order to achieve positives (as defined by the Alignment), which reminds Beowulf all to clearly of the Asian super soldiers of the Final War.
Beowulf is quite prepared for all of the various genetically enhanced genotypes running around the Galaxy to . . . cross pollinate, let’s say, and if you asked a Beowulfan geneticist what he/she thought the ultimate outcome of that would be, he or she would probably respond “a superior human being.” That individual would not have been designed intentionally to be a superior human being, and he would be an individual, not an entire population of Homo superior which would eventually supplant everyone else. Perhaps the best way to parse the difference between the Beowulfan and Alignment viewpoints is that Beowulfers are focused on the individual, whereas the Alignment is ruthlessly collective, arguing that the good of the species always trumps the good of the individual. This colors virtually everything about the two societies involved. Beowulfers are individualists, supporters of meritocracy, and yet believers in the complete legal and moral equality of all sentient beings (not simply humans) despite even quantifiable differences in their capabilities. The Alignment is collectivist, supports meritocracy as defined by the Alignment, and believes in a legal and moral system which gives superior rights to those of quantifiably superior genetic ability. The Alignment not only sees nothing wrong with the reemergence of a genetically-based racism; it sees the emergence of an openly genetically racist society as inevitable. True, the Alignment would argue that ultimately all humanity would be raised to the level of the Alpha lines, at which point the overtly racist system favoring the Alphas over any other lines would inevitably wither away. If you will recall, however, Marxism envisioned the withering away of the state once the vanguard of the proletariat had accomplished a fundamental shift in human nature and produced the true socialist man. Beowulfers, probably because they are accustomed to thinking of the individual as trumping the collective, rather than the reverse, would have exactly zero faith in the “withering away” of the Alignment’s genetically-based hierarchy.
Now, it can legitimately be argued that Beowulf, in eschewing a program of direct, explicit, targeted improvement of the human baseline turned its back on the potential to improve the human race as a species. That was, in fact, Leonard Detweiler’s position. And, for those of you who have asked, Leonard Detweiler probably would’ve been horrified by the Alignment’s current strategies and policies. Detweiler never envisioned the horrendous dehumanization of genetic slaves. In fact, he never specifically referred to them as “slaves” at all. Don’t get me wrong — for his time, and considering the culture from which he sprang, he was an incredibly ruthless bastard, perfectly prepared to create thousands or even millions of human beings who would be second-class citizens. He had, however, almost a patriarchal perspective on the genetic “indentured servants” he created, and the Mesa constitution’s provision for manumission of genetic slaves was inserted at his insistence. Moreover, he regarded the creation of the “indentured servants” as a priceless opportunity to incorporate superior characteristics into them and (through them, in the fullness of time) into all the rest of the human race. They were to be his laboratory, in which individually valuable genetic traits would be developed, enhanced, and conserved in the process of solving individual specific needs. In a sense, this was the same logic as the Beowulf code’s willingness to modify colonists to better suit them to their new planetary environments except that by commercializing the process on a large-scale basis, Detweiler was creating a far larger experimental population with a view towards eventually combining all of those individually engineered traits into a single genetically superior species. As part of his mindset, emancipated “indentured servants” were never supposed to become Seccies. Once they were emancipated, they were supposed to have the vote, to see their children fully integrated into Mesan society, etc. To be honest, that was probably the least realistic of his several unrealistic assumptions of what was possible, but it was fundamental to his own thinking and the moral system which justified everything else he was prepared to do.
After his death, the “Detweiler vision” was corrupted, as generally happens in a closed society which sees itself as a threatened/visionary minority surrounded by hostility and threats to its noble purpose. Moderation is normally the first casualty of that sort of environment, and paranoia and megalomania while not necessarily inevitable are certainly likely. Driven underground, confronted by Beowulf’s savage denunciation of genetic slavery (and Beowulf was the first to insist upon that term instead of “indentured servant”) and (in what became the Alignment’s opinion) vilified for simply desiring to improve all humans, the Alignment’s leadership started its gradual but steadily steeper slide into what it has become by Honor Alexander-Harrington’s day. The Alignment continues to see genetic slaves as a vast, readily available laboratory which can supply any desired number of test subjects. In the process (exactly as Beowulf argued would happen) the Alignment has so dehumanized genetic slaves that it never even occurs to its leadership to question what is routinely done to them. Indeed, to a point at which genetic slavery’s advantages as a way to corrupt and ensnare potentially valuable tools and as a mask or façade concealing covert Alignment operations and attracting any suspicious eye to the outward monster and away from the inward one, totally outweighs any moral compunction they might feel for what they have done to millions upon millions of human beings over the centuries.
If you asked members of the Alignment why this has happened — and if the member you asked was capable of recognizing the Alignment’s policies in this regard as an evil — the majority response would be that it is a direct consequence of Beowulf’s genetic Luddites' bigotry and fundamentalist unwillingness to recognize that genetic uplift — targeted genetic uplift — is the inevitable wave of the future. Those members of the Alignment will cling to that view with the same sort of fanaticism that prevented many a Marxist from recognizing the difference between Marxism and Stalinism, and they will justify the Alignment’s many excesses and atrocities in exactly the same way a Stalinist justified Stalin’s excesses and atrocities in the name of defending the Marxist revolution. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t members of the Alignment who, faced with something like a Francesca and Herlander Simões, wouldn’t turn out to be additional Jack McBrydes. It means that the initial vision of Leonard Detweiler has been not simply corrupted but institutionalized as a conspiratorial, revolutionary organization which measures the moral acceptability of any given act or strategy solely in terms of whether or not it believes that act or strategy advances the achievement of its “noble” goal.
Since I’ve already wandered somewhat afield from the topic I originally set out to discuss, I should also point out that Albrecht Detweiler and his sons are not clones of Leonard Detweiler. They are, in effect, the current generation of the steadily improved Detweiler genotype. Remember we’re talking about a prolong society here, and the actual age difference between Albrecht and Benjamin isn’t very great for that sort of society. Nor are the offspring of the Detweiler “sons” genetic duplicates of their parents. Albrecht was cloned, frankly, because by all of the tests the Alignment could apply, he was going to be an incredibly capable generalist and leader and the Long-Range Planning Board decided that given how far into the endgame of the Alignment’s strategy they were, it made a great deal of sense to provide an entire cohort of equally capable leaders to whom Albrecht could delegate areas of responsibility.
To get back to the topic I originally set out to discuss, I think that a great many people are seeing Beowulf and its code as overly parochial and uncategorically opposed to “pushing the envelope” on the improvement of humanity. Because of the human race’s experiences in the Final War, and because Beowulf has not forgotten humanity’s long history of prejudice, and because of Beowulf’s genetic level (you should pardon the phrase) devotion to the worth and inherent value of the individual, the Beowulf code is prepared to improve humanity one human at a time but unalterably opposed to creating some sort of template for what constitutes improvement and driving towards it on a species-wide basis. Beowulfan society (as it is structured in my own mind) is not anti-religion, although the percentage of people who believe in God (or a god) is certainly lower than it is in, say, the United States of 2014. To the extent to which Beowulf might be said to have a “state religion,” however, that religion would be the belief that human beings are incredibly complex systems and that anyone who believes that he can impose a single “superior” set of traits upon the human race is automatically limiting the height which the human race can attain. A Beowulfan geneticist would argue that however thoroughly a gene map may be plotted, the combinations and permutations inherent within the material are too complex, too chaotic, and too ultimately unbridled and unlimited for anyone’s understanding of all the possibilities to drive towards the one, best goal. No doubt much of that is philosophical, at least as much as “scientific,” but ultimately (in Beowulf’s view . . . and my own), philosophy, morality, and (yes, in my own case) religion are the basis upon which the possibilities of science must be assessed. Nuclear fusion happens constantly in nature; whether we want it falling out of the belly of a B-2 bomber is a philosophical and moral decision.
Ultimately, I’m fairly sympathetic to the Leonard Detweiler view of the possibilities and value of deliberate, targeted genetic “improvement” on the baseline Version 1.0 of humanity. What they’ve accomplished in their own Alpha and Beta lines demonstrates the potential for improving the human genotype. So do Honor Alexander-Harrington, Benjamin Mayhew, Yana Tretiakovna, and a gentleman named Jeremy X. However, despite any sympathy I may feel for Leonard’s original view and objectives for improving humanity’s DNA, I find Beowulf’s more limited view of what is acceptable far more likely to preserve humanity’s humanity.
It’s not my intention to paint the Alignment — or any of its individual members — as cardboard cutout, mustache-twirling Agents of Evil. I think they are agents of evil, but it isn’t because they have knowingly and willingly embraced evil. It’s because they are so consumed by their purpose that they are unable to recognize evil actions when they are the very ones committing them.
Your viewpoint, of course, may be quite different than my own. I’ve simply attempted to lay out the way in which I see and understand what is happening in the conflict between these two fundamentally and profoundly opposed viewpoints.
