In his acceptance speech for the Edmund Burke award, given by The New Criterion, Charles Murray predicts that in the next two centuries, “humankind will long since have acquired the ability to modify its own genome. The natural outcome of this new knowledge will be to enhance human capabilities and empower the individual in fabulous ways. It is, of course, possible that some nightmarish political dystopia will have triumphed, but that is not the most plausible scenario.” Murray’s view of the “natural outcome of this new knowledge” doesn’t sound very Burkean. Burke said, “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of Nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.” If you think that science will save us and dismiss fears that new knowledge will be abused, you may be many things; but you are not a follower of Edmund Burke.

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