At the end of his latest column, Charles Krauthammer tries and fails to make an allusion to a literary classic, Goethe's Faust, and fails. Faust was not interested in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but merely to enhance himself. Faust made no promises to anyone, except himself, and even then he realized his deal with Mephistopheles was not so much evil as misguided. A better literary example, perhaps, would have been Shelley's Frankenstein, where the "modern Prometheus" oversteps the boundaries of morally acceptable behavior out of a concern not only for knowledge in and for itself, but out of a desire to serve humanity. His creation turns on him precisely because it refuses to be a means, but as a living creature with both will and understanding, should be an end in and of and for itself. Even here, I suppose the analogy breaks down (as all analogies do and must in the end) because, unlike Frankenstein's creation, emrbyos and stem cells aredevoid of even that level of being that Frankenstein's monster attains.
I point out the failure of Krauthammer's allusion as an object lesson. It points out the utter uselessness, indeed pointlessness, of the column. If one takes him at his word within the context of the column itself, it is, in the end quite literally meaningless, and his praise of Bush equally meaningless. To make an incorrect allusion to Faust only illustrates how utterly vacuous a thousand or so words can be.
In the column, praising Bush for limiting stem cell research funding, Krauthammer sets out his objections to Bush's original policy: he had no problem with stem-cell research; he had no problem with experimentation upon embryos that would have been discarded (although Krauthammer uses the morally loaded term "killed"); he was opposed to Bush's original policy for a variety or reasons.
Yet, somehow, Bush outsmarted even Dr. Krauthammer, because, lo and behold! they have found stem cells in amniotic fluid that are capable of the kind of manipulation that embryonic stem cells are. So, you see, Bush was right, even though he was wrong, because now we don't have to experiment on embryos even though he has no problem with such research (although he does make the rather strange, and equally meaningless statement that embryos aren't "nothing"; well, if they aren't nothing, which is both true and irrelevant, wwhat are they because that is the heart of the issue). He faults those who promoted such research for promising too much, which of course they did not ever do. They offered the possibility that embryonic stem cell research offered promising results, but that research was necessary in order to find out exactly how promising. With the funding for such research cut off, there was no way for any of the promises potentially existent within embryonic stem cells to be shown to be hollow or not. Krauthammer admits that religious fundamentalism was behind the decision, but calls the charge loaded, because secularists can be troubled by embryonic stem cell research, too. That such arguments weren't used, Krauthammer acknowledges, it is just that they could have been.
So, Bush was right even though he was wrong. Krauthammer was wrong even though he was right. Bush's critics were wrong even though they were right, and Krauthammer agreed with them. And Faust promised us nirvanna.
I haven't read such cocakmamie drivel since someone compared Bush's speechifying to Winston Churchill.
Oh, wait, that was Krauthammer, too.
Maybe he should go back to psychiatry, but take a logic course, first.
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