Lines That Divide: The Great Stem Cell Debate is a conservative propaganda film arguing that Americans should forgo embryonic-stem-cell research in favor of research using stem cells derived from adults and from other sources that do not require the destruction of a human organism. It was recently shown to an audience at the National Press Club and is being distributed on DVD. (You can buy a copy here.)
The film puts, or should put, conservatives in a difficult position. Its premise is sound — creating and destroying human beings for the purpose of medical and biotechnological research is a ghastly project and one that is, literally, inhumane. But the film, which is earnestly well intended and clearly created by intelligent people, engages in a great deal of intellectual dishonesty of types familiar to students of rhetoric: the straw man, the false choice, the placing of an invisible authorial thumb on the evidentiary scale, &c.
The film repeatedly asks: Are there to be “no moral restraints” on scientific research? Are we willing to seek medical progress “at any price”? But the question is not one of conducting research with “no moral constraints,” nor is it of progress “at any price.” We have been asked to evaluate particular sets of moral constraints, and asked whether we are willing to pay a specific price, in particular the destruction of unwanted embryos created for in vitro fertilization procedures– which are very likely to be destroyed in any case — and of the clones created from them.
But instead of addressing these questions, which are difficult, the film argues that embryonic-stem-cell research is both morally repugnant (true) and devoid of scientific value (untrue). It treats issues such as pluripotency, the ability of a stem cell to develop into any sort of tissue, in a cavalier way: Pluripotency in embryonic cells is abominated as a cause of tumors, but pluripotency induced in non-embryonic stem cells is celebrated as a triumph, and the complexities of the issue are not adequately addressed. Biotech companies consistently are treated as the villains of the story, and they are criticized simply for being profit-driven, as though research undertaken for profit were inherently impure; the risks of certain drugs and procedures are exaggerated, as is the vulnerability of the women who undergo egg-harvesting procedures for money; and many facts and arguments are given without sufficient context.
But films are not graduate seminars in logic: They are assemblages of light and sound. While clever propagandists can make great use of decontextualized data (51 million Americans don’t have health insurance! some Wall Street clod got paid $100 million! children in small towns are 104 percent more likely to use crystal meth than those in big cities!), cinema works through images. Images such as this one:
That’s Michael Clarke Duncan playing a clone about to be killed to have his organs harvested in the dystopian film The Island. It is a powerful image, and one that Lines That Divide appropriates, along with those of disgusting human-animal hybrids from The Island of Doctor Moreau, creepy corporate geneticists in Gattaca, and, inevitably, the monster from Frankenstein.
Michael Clarke Duncan has a wonderfully expressive face and a magnificent human presence. His thespian duty in The Island is to communicate a single desire: I want to live! He is, needless to say, easier to relate to than is a microscopic blastocyst. He is also black, and that is not merely incidental. Seeing a black man suffering, his entirety reduced to his body, which is, in return, reduced to a saleable commodity, an American inescapably is reminded of slavery, of what historically has happened when we have encountered human beings who have so little in common with us that we have decided, as a practical matter, that they are not human beings at all. (Very tiny, those embryos.) This reduction of humanity is often referred to as “the instrumentalization of human life,” a phrase used both by Catholic ethicists and by followers of Michel Foucault (strange bedfellows!).
With all apologies to various pontiffs and pontificators, it is not clear that “the instrumentalization of human life” amounts to anything more than an item of rhetoric. When pressed about what will happen to the enormous number of frozen human embryos left over from artificial fertilization treatments — they will be destroyed — one of the advocates interviewed in Lines That Divide simply insists: This is a question of the instrumentalization of human life! As though the mere invocation of that phrase somehow illuminates the moral difference between destroying embryos for no reason, and destroying embryos for potentially life-saving research.
If we believe that embryos have the same human value as born children and adults, this reasoning becomes preposterous: Imagine a four-year-old being put to death for no reason of particular social interest and his twin brother being put to death for the purpose of harvesting his organs, and the ethicists ignoring the first but raising an alarum in the second instance: Oh, dear us, the instrumentalization of human life!
The unpleasant fact is that if “the instrumentalization of human life” means anything, it seems to mean something that a very large number of Americans give every appearance of being mostly comfortable with. Human life is not exactly sacred in the United States, and even less so in the rest of the developed world. (How do you say “instrumentalization of human life” in Japanese? Russian? Korean?) Ignoring that, Lines That Divide indulges one of the least illuminating habits of our political discourse, arguing that ignorance, and only ignorance, explains the fact that the ideas advocated by its creators have found only limited purchase in the public mind. Repeatedly, the film argues that Americans would turn against embryonic-stem-cell research if only they were fully informed about it. (Never mind, for now, that this is not a film that seeks to fully inform its audience.)
Americans are excruciatingly well informed about what an abortion entails, and the current rate of abortion is about 25 percent of all U.S. pregnancies, possibly higher. One in three American women will have an abortion over the course of her life; 2 percent will do so in any given year. So, the McLaughlin Group question to meditate upon: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 denoting absolute intellectual sobriety and 10 being well and truly bonkers, how delusional is it to believe that Americans, who are broadly tolerant of these facts, will take seriously the destruction of a 100-cell embryo? (Answer: about 7.2.)
But then, making conservative agitprop already is a difficult proposition; incorporating the fact that Americans are a morally unserious people, and getting more so by the year, probably is impractical as a matter of cinematic strategy. And the stagnation of decadent and dying societies is better suited to epic poetry than to documentary films, in any case. (Perhaps the omnicapable Mark Steyn might be persuaded to switch to verse: “Arma demographiaque canto, arma demographiaque!”)
What is especially dismaying about Lines That Divide, and works similar to it, is that the pro-life intellectuals have better political arguments than do their opponents. (And here “pro-life” is used advisedly: The stem-cell debate is always and everywhere a political and cultural proxy for the abortion debate.) Fundamentally, the pro-life side argues that human organisms should all enjoy the same moral status, regardless of their stage of development. It is the other camp that must take refuge in the metaphysical legerdemain of “personhood,” an arbitrary, legalistic construct subject to endless revision to satisfy present circumstance. There is no scientific argument that an embryo is not a human organism, inasmuch as an embryo satisfies the definition of “organism” and demonstrably is an organism of the human sort. This, and not the 30-minute infomercial for miracle cures derived from adult stem cells into which Lines That Divide dissolves in its bottom third, is the argument that should be presented.
Or must it? There is an argument that it is better to reach the right policy outcomes for the wrong reasons than to insist upon intellectual probity and lose in the public square. Which is a way of asking: Do conservatives need propaganda?
There are three logical possibilities here: 1) Conservative ideas are in some important sense true, and will therefore win out in the marketplace of ideas as market participants sort through the evidence, logic, and merit of various claims—no propaganda necessary; 2) Conservative ideas are in some important sense true, but the marketplace of ideas suffers from massive market failures (cf. Obama, Barack; delusional yet maddeningly successful rhetoric of) and therefore it is necessary, in the greater service of the truth, to engage in communication that is, at some level, deceitful; 3) Conservative ideas have no special claim on the truth but are only one set of largely arbitrary preferences among many possible sets of largely arbitrary preferences, and therefore conservatives’ only operational concern is ensuring that their preferences prevail.
For those who argue, as many conservatives do, that what the Right most needs is a Michael Moore of its own, celebrity advocates of its own, a blonde bouquet of Carrie Prejeans — which is to say, more propaganda and propagandists — the question must be asked: If our ideas cannot prevail on their merits, and require rougher tactics, isn’t it as likely that the problem is our ideas, and not our tactics?
Liberals reliably make the self-serving claim that their ideas — which are, according to liberal scripture, the immaculately conceived offspring of Reason and Compassion — require liberals to lie, cheat, ridicule, mislead, and generally fight dirty, because the world is so devoid of Reason and Compassion. (Recent and typical and generally embarrassing example here.) And liberals who have never read a word of Leo Strauss will nonetheless argue that conservatives who have never read a word of Leo Strauss are yet in thrall to his notion (which was not really his notion) that it is morally obligatory to deceive the plebs with “noble lies” in the service of the greater good. The opposition has no moral standing, the argument goes, so dishonest counter-tactics are acceptable. Conservatives sometimes do this, too, lately those who have entertained “birther” conspiracy theorizing — not believing a word of it, of course, but eager to take up any cudgel with which to beat President Obama, however disreputable the instrument at hand.
Perhaps it is that conservatives identify themselves too much with the Republican party, and the recent travails of that party have left us insecure and seeking champions in the public square. That is a slightly pathetic but understandable need. Conservatives have been right about much: right about Communism, right about free markets, right about economic incentives, individual rights, the rule of law, the chaos that results from the decay of family life and social institutions. We’re probably right about stem cells, too. The fact that we beg to have a Michael Moore of our own to tell us we’re right, when already we have Evangelium Vitae or Robert George to do so, is one of the better measures of how much we have lost, as a movement and as a civilization.
– Kevin Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.