CRISPR, STEAM, and science for the sake of happiness

LISTEN. "Socrates is CRISPR," said the old NPR commentator and homme de lettres Andrei Codrescu last night, in the Science Building at our school (participating in something called a "STEAM Festival"-that's STEM plus A for the Arts, an attempt to bridge the historic two-cultures divide). The question mark, he said, has always been our greatest gene-editing tool. So it will remain, so long as we value and practice philosophical curiosity.

Not sure how the scientists in the audience all felt about that. The man in front of me who prefaced his own question to Codrescu with "I'm a scientist and when I have a question I go into the lab and design an experiment..." seemed puzzled and possibly a bit irritated by the notion that non-scientists like Socrates are playing the same game as he.

But Codrescu at one point defined science simply as the quest for truth. Philosophers, then, are scientists too. But do they really alter genes? Do they engage with, modify, or otherwise have anything at all to do with "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats"? Well... not literally. [CRISPR explained-video]

Codrescu is a poet, he has a license to say such things. Plato's Socrates, he also reminded us, wanted to ban poets from his utopian republic. Fortunately for us all, utopia still means "no place." The science of poetry survives. It still edits thoughts and feelings, if not genes straight-on. It still communicates truths and exemplifies one of the ways we may seek them.

Codrescu didn't mention Bertrand Russell's "The Value of Philosophy," but he might have.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

He might also have mentioned Royce's Spirit. "You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life involves passions, faiths, doubt, and courage. The critical inquiry into what all these things mean and imply is philosophy." And, as his biographer summarizes,

"We live like those who stand on the shore of a limitless ocean of appreciation; we describe a pebble and a wave or two, but know that vast depths, solitudes, and storms remain beyond unexplored. The meaning is seen only as waves breaking on the beach, as evidences of a restless life. We call these waves evolution, but to the extent that we are in touch with our own depths, we know also that much remains undescribed."

In Happiness today we take up the small collection of Epicurus's extant writings on seeking the truth of how to live a good human life. In the foreword of The Art of Happiness, speaking of bridging cultures, we're reminded that Epicurean happiness parallels Buddhism. (The Dalai Lama has also published The Art of Happiness, btw.)  "Happiness is tranquility, and tranquility comes principally from putting aside worldly “hankerings”— ambitions for power, status, involvement in government, the pursuit of voluptuous sensory experiences, and the accumulation of material
goods. Two of Epicurus's most quoted maxims distill this idea: 'Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance' and... 'Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.'"

In other words, we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden. Epicurean happiness, ataraxia, is an absence of pain. We've got to shuck the pain of life in the fast lane, if we want to reach "the summit of human experience sometimes known as 'being here now.'"

In other other words, Thoreau's: Simplify, simplify.

And here's a thought for the CRISPR crowd. "The Epicurean savior today would be the humanitarian scientist, who would tell us that cancer is not divinely sent but naturally caused, even though he does not yet know its precise cause. With the Epicureans it was never science for the sake of science but always science for the sake of human happiness." If that's what gene editing is for, I'm all for it.

POSTSCRIPT: It was great to welcome Andrei Codrescu to both my afternoon classes on Thursday. He read poems, answered questions, urged us not to take our democratic freedoms for granted, and generally impressed with his graciousness and insight. Thanks, Andrei!