An open letter to young adults of 2025

 

Nasturtiums

You may not know this, but you are living in a lucky age. It's a time when our world has tilted far too much to a winner/loser mentality. So much so that democracies are weakening and authoritarian ideas are strengthening. In a winner/loser world, the essentials of decency and cooperation, indeed the right to life is debased: winners take all; losers ... who cares.

            My education took place in another lucky time. I was born exactly one week after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, December 14, 1941, and lived through the aftermath of two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and shared the terror with the whole world as the Nuclear Bomb proliferated to the point where at any moment, a madman might obliterate life as we knew it. The threat of its use coloured our Weltanschauung, our worldview, and our political understandings far more than we acknowledged.

            So why lucky? The events of war and their precursors provided me ... and now you ... with a laboratory inviting us to think deeply beyond win and lose. What have we done, what were we thinking that made the debacles in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Iran possible? The conflicts have roots, and woe to us if our thinking goes no deeper than speculating on who will win, who will lose, and crossing our fingers in the hope that harm won’t fall on us.

            Certainly some of your peers will be content to party and plagiarize their way through their maturing years, as they did in mine. But for those of you whose curiosity and attention has a broader scope than win/lose, self-focused indulgence, I pose five thought experiments. Take them to your brain-lab and reach for evidence-based answers: 

1)     Why is the spread between rich and poor growing?

2)     “Freedom of Speech” is an oft repeated shibboleth. That there are limits is obvious (slander, libel, blabbing state secrets). What would make a workable description of free speech in a democracy like Canada.

3)     What conditions are needed for your neighbour to live a contented life. In other words, does Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs still apply?

4)     What is money's purpose, and are we using wealth appropriately or has its purpose been bastardized with time, and does it matter?

5)     What dangers being predicted concerning the increasing application of Artificial Intelligence are valid, and why? 

Obviously, few have time to do the problem-method-observation-conclusion lab study on six broad issues, but I challenge you to apply your thinking and research to some of these matters. The stream of misinformation aided by image manipulation, outright lying, undeserved adulation and denigration, and partisan gate-keeping at news outlets is appalling. There's that in our very nature making us vulnerable to bias confirmation, so it takes an effort to contemplate other viewpoints judiciously. It's likely going to be your generation that leads us forward toward sanity ... or allows this “going to hell in a handcart” phenomenon grow 'til the winners can be declared and the losers disposed of. 

            It's a lucky time for you. If you join hands with your fellow thinkers to create a better future where truth reigns, you will find yourselves in that exhilarating atmosphere of discovery and innovation, like Galileo, Copernicus, Fleming, Einstein, Rousseau … If you have faith in yourselves, you will move mountains. 

George G. Epp

gg.epp41@gmail.com

306-212-7741

naica (no ai content or assistance)

 

Stem cell research

Arizona Snow - March, 2007

What does embryonic stem cell research have to do with me?

What is moral? What’s immoral? What’s amoral?

I remember a discussion in church a long time ago on the subject of sin. Specifically, it questioned why we never hear the word anymore and whether or not we’ve written the concept of sin out of our theology—or at least out of our dialogue about our theology.

Interesting word, sin. Oxford says it’s “the breaking of divine or moral law, esp. by a conscious act.”

“The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:4),” says the prophet Ezekiel. “But he that sinneth against me [the LORD] wrongeth his own soul (Proverbs 8:36.).” (References to KJV)

This is serious stuff.

It may have been in the backs of our minds the other day as we talked over lunch about President Obama’s move to end the restriction on embryonic stem cell research. On the one hand, such research may open the door for shysters to make a business of harvesting embryos (human offspring in the first eight or twelve weeks from conception – Oxford) like a cash crop. On the other hand, embryonic stem cells (undifferentiated cell[s] from which specialized cells develop – Oxford) offer hope for cures for debilitating diseases: Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, to name two. As I understand it, stem cells exist in everyone’s body in small amounts, can be found in umbilical blood and can be retrieved from aborted or miscarried embryos. But like the work of Einstein led to the creation of the nuclear bomb, this scientific development has potential for massive misuse.

So is it immoral (sinful) to research embryonic stem cell harvesting? Although a broad moral code regarding the sanctity of life could be applied here, we lack a specific “moral law” that could be applied. I assume it would be clearly immoral to kill a person in order to harvest his organs for sale, and so it would likely be clear as well if we deliberately destroyed a developing embryo for the sale of its stem cells. We have already settled the question of utilizing organs of consenting, deceased persons. We accept it as a moral act. A fetus that is miscarried, by this token, would be an eligible donor of stem cells. Probably not so if human embryos are cultured in a Petri dish solely for their stem cells, or if a person needing stem cells pays for a woman’s abortion in order to get them.

Are those who research the application of stem cells to medicine “breaking [a] divine or moral law, esp. by a conscious act?” I don’t believe so; they are more likely following the natural course of genetic research in the hope of finding cures for illnesses.

I support science’s search for knowledge, even when it leads into areas of discomfort. At the same time, since the people through their governments are ultimately responsible for deciding where the borders between immorality, morality and amorality lie with regard to embryonic stem cells, it is the people through the processes of democracy who must enunciate the moral code on this subject. Governments must find a way to lay the relevant information and a proper question before them.

Or, the point may end up being moot. There is, apparently, a promising line of research that “is developing techniques to convert skin cells into Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS cells) that emulate embryonic stem cells (http://www.religioustolerance.org/res_stem.htm). If this technique proves to be efficacious, there may be no need to visit the question of the embryo as a human life for this issue. We will, however, still experience the raging debate over the humanness of an embryo as regards abortion.

So is all this about sin? I don’t see people consciously breaking divine or moral codes in their search for ethical answers regarding the treatment of human embryos. Mind you, a lot could be happening out of my sight.

Healing people’s diseases is definitely a moral undertaking; that’s clear—philosophically and theologically. The principle of revering human life is implicit in the healing arts; it must also be implicit in the search for new cures.

copyright, g.epp, 2009