"Gentle Joe" vs. The Don on Genetics
Why Joe Biden is right and Donald Trump is wrong about how we should respond to genetics.
I am something of an obsessive when it comes to genetics. For better and for worse, your behavior, your intelligence and your personality are all heritable though how much is a matter of same debate. This much we know.
But what shall we do with this knowledge? Shall we exploit people or shall we be a good steward of their affliction? That much is the realm of policy and that policy should be humanely informed.
Adam Entous of the New Yorker has written a remarkable piece about the Biden family. I was particularly struck by this kindness.
The only member of the family who talked about alcoholism was Biden. He told his siblings that he would give them each a hundred dollars if they didn’t drink before they turned twenty-one. “Joe, I believe, saw the ravages of alcoholism and what it had done in the extended family, and he didn’t want any of that visited upon us,” Frank told me. “Alcoholism is a genetic disease, but what has to happen is you have to trigger it, you have to light the kindling, you’ve got to fuel the flame to get that gene activated. I think Joe understood that.”
Keep that in mind then when you consider Donald Trump’s views. Here’s Trump’s assessment of genetics.
From Biden we get stewardship and kindness. From Trump we get genetics as personal vanity — complimentary, yes, but almost always exclusionary and discriminatory. This is what Trump’s obsession with casting and “the look” is all about and why Trump is so uncomfortable around handicapped people.
I may be overly harsh about Trump's thoughts on sobriety. He obviously had his Studio 54 life, but his brother's death really did affect him.
Biden too, overplays the sobriety hand. He used to be wasted on the Acela back to Wilmington, and I've seen him have to be carried out of a bar he did an event at in '07.
Still, there’s a meme that’s been circulating that shows “Dark Brandon” winning all over the place but I prefer Gentle Joe. The more I read of Joe Biden, the more I think he was winning from long before that. His essential decency is very real.
A friend noted that “you might be the only public person in the world that would stand up and say, ‘Well, actually, I like Donald Trump and I also like Joe Biden.’”
One of the nice things about having an old white guy as president is that you aren’t spoon fed obvious lies and asked to swallow them lest you reveal your bigotry. The focus can be on discovering who the person is in real time—through their actions and not through the mess that is the press.
Now how we approach the question of data and health is very much a moving question and it’s one that requires real attention to detail.
With Trump we got efforts to compromise the Veterans Affairs administration through Israeli-American billionaire Ike Perlmutter and lobbyist Jeff Miller whose firm is under FBI investigation. With Biden we got the Health DARPA, which is admittedly run by that faker Eric Lander before his Lander was forced out.
Different worlds are possible and necessary.
One could imagine a world in which we genetically sequence people and then target them with the vices to which they are uniquely susceptible. We sequence you, we know you like alcohol a little too much, and we give you discounts so that you can indulge in your greatest vice. This is the Sheryl Sandberg world. Of course this Sheryl Sandberg world is ultimately the Jeffrey Epstein one. Your weaknesses, catalogued and deployed against you for profit and ultimately, against you.
Or we could have a world where we take care of the least of God’s children — where we extend the Americans with Disabilities Act to the genetic domain and care for everyone as best we can with the latest technology available.
Do you struggle with face blindness? Here’s some facial recognition, brought to you by Clearview.Ai. In fact not offering facial recognition to people who suffer from face blindness might be a violation of the ADA and if it isn’t I’m sure I could find a trial lawyer who thinks it might be. Of course people would notice that all these people who have their facial recognition app seem to get a lot more things done.
What would you be prepared to get or give up for your genetics? We could imagine a world in which people were giving discounts for getting genetically sequenced. You’d sit down at a restaurant and you’d be asked if you have any allergic reactions. You’d say you don’t know. The restaurant would offer to sell you a genetics kit and, next time you go to the restaurant, they’ll know exactly what you’d want to eat.
Genetics then would be about stewardship but also convenience. Convenience is the American way.