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Steven Pinker has a frightening piece in the today. He analyzes the President's Council on Bioethics report released earlier this spring, and notes the strong influence of (TNR contributor) Leon Kass on the panel. Pinker also digs up this often and justifiably mocked passage from one of Kass's essays:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
As Pinker sardonically notes, the freedom-hating Kass went on to become the president's adviser, from which perch he convinced Bush to ban federal funding of research using stem-cell lines. It makes one long for the day when Bush hacks were merely incompetent, not actually illiberal.
--Jordan Michael Smith
