Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

Some activists have argued against the entire Human Genome Project, maintaining that it implies the existence of a perfect genome. The Genome Project has been construed this way partly because its authors pitched it to funders as a way to cure maladies, without acknowledging that there is no universal standard of well-being. Disability advocates argue that in nature, variation is the only invariable. Donna Haraway, who teaches feminist and cultural studies, has described the project as an “act of canonization” that could be used to establish ever-narrower standards. Michel Foucault, writing before the mapping of the genome was feasible, described how “a technology of abnormal individuals appears precisely when a regular network of knowledge and power has been established.” In other words, the spectrum of normality gets constrained when those in power consolidate their privilege. In Foucault’s view, the idea of normality “claimed to ensure the physical vigor and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized populations. In the name of biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state.” It thus encouraged people outside normality to perceive themselves as helpless and inadequate. If, as Foucault had also argued, “life is what is capable of error” and error itself is “at the root of what makes human thought and its history,” then to prohibit error would be to end evolution.