Literatures dystopian future is closer than you think – The Age

Hsu was forced to resign from his position as senior vice-president for research and innovation at Michigan State University in 2020 after hundreds of academics at the university signed petitions complaining about his comments about intelligence correlating with groups of humans. He is still employed there as a tenured academic, but many feel his work shares principles with the eugenics movement. Hsu is also an advisor to BGI (the worlds largest genetic research centre, based in Shenzen) and a member of its cognitive genomics lab.

Playing God is a term we hear a lot when we discuss these types of processes. When a couple pay Genomic Prediction to help them select the best of their embryos, they remove a significant part of the historical reproduction process: the rolling of the dice. The effects of this siphoning may be small-ish in a single generation, but consider the effects of this type of selection bias over four or five generations and an even more concerning picture emerges. What truly stopped me in my tracks more recently was a blog post of Hsus from 2012 when he wrote Imagine what a couple might pay to ensure that they get the best out of 10 or 50 possible offspring, optimising over their choice of heritable attributes, and then Compare this with the cost of a Harvard education or K-12 private school tuition. The cost of an IVF cycle is down to a few thousand dollars and could go even lower I hope that progressive governments will make this procedure free for everyone.

Huxleys dystopian vision was born of his fascination with, and fear of, eugenics. His brother, Julian, was an award-winning evolutionary biologist and prominent member of the British Eugenics Society. While Julian was correct in believing that what people referred to as race had no real biological basis, he did believe that eugenics could remove undesirable traits from the human gene pool. The lowest strata, he said in 1941, referring to the poor, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. By contrast, Orwells vision of the future came from his fear of totalitarianism and hatred of the ruling elite. Both authors knew what the extreme end of class stratification looked like; both had attended Eton. When their imaginations held the reins in fiction, their fear and loathing of humans worst impulses domination and subjugation were set free.

More than 20 per cent of Australian five-year-olds start school developmentally vulnerable. There are a complex set of reasons for this, but several solutions are obvious and remain unchanged. The Early Years Education Program (EYEP), for example, was developed by Associate Professor Brigid Jordan and Dr Anne Kennedy in partnership with the Childrens Protection Society, an independent not-for-profit child welfare organisation in Melbourne. Young children who were identified as experiencing extreme adversity (due to a range of factors such as lower birth weight and low family income levels) were offered three years of care and education in the program. The result was an estimated impact on IQ of five to seven points. The report on this program from 2019 is called Changing the Life Trajectories of Australias Most Vulnerable Children and it is compelling evidence for early intervention.

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Thrive By Five is an organisation campaigning to make our early learning childcare system high quality and universally accessible. They believe this is the most significant educational, social and economic reform of our era. A report they were involved in from 2019 titled How Australia can invest early and return more: A new look at the $15 billion cost and opportunity highlighted that poverty, crime, disengagement from education and substance abuse are all correlated for young people, as are family violence, homelessness and child protection issues.

In January 2020, former prime minister Tony Abbott said: That is a real problem in every Western country: middle-class women do not have enough kids. Women in the welfare system have lots of kids. A new report from Credit Suisse has found that in 2020, Australia recorded the third-highest national increase in the number of millionaires, with real estate and share values driving up mean and median wealth to the highest in the world. In the same year, weekly rents for the have-nots increased significantly in almost every major city. Despite this nations extraordinary wealth, we still do not provide young people with universal early childhood education. For children five and up, education is a right, but for those aged four and below, it is welfare for their mothers. The result of this absurd distinction has us trundling along the path to ever-worsening stratification.

Huxley wondered how wed class people pre-birth; Orwell asked how wed do it post-birth. In 2021, science is taking us towards a Brave New World while economic policy is taking us towards 1984. Plagues and epidemics feature in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction too, often taking humanity to a shared brink of destruction. In real life, COVID-19 has not, in fact, affected us all equally. We are in the second half of the second year of this pandemic, and the data shows that the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer. What a missed opportunity. The optimum population is modelled on the iceberg eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above, Huxley wrote. The one-ninth in Australia have no interest in sharing utopia, thats for sure.

Bri Lees latest book isWho Gets to be Smart: Privilege, Power and Knowledge. She takes part in Lets Talk About Sex on September 11, 2pm, and Oh, The Humanities on September 12, noon, both at the Wheeler Centre, as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, September 3-12. The Age is a festival partner. mwf.com.au

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Literatures dystopian future is closer than you think - The Age