Scientists genetically engineered a pig so that it had a more humanlike heart, and doctors have transplanted that heart into a patient who needed one.
This is 2022, and so the story can’t be about the science. Instead, two of the largest national newspapers have run full-length stories about how the guy getting the heart transplant is no angel.
“The ethics of a second chance: Pig heart transplant recipient stabbed a man seven times years ago,” ran the Washington Post piece Thursday.
“Patient in Groundbreaking Heart Transplant Has a Violent Criminal Record,” said the New York Times.
Is this an interesting story? Yes. Should the Washington Post and New York Times have reported, written, and run it? I wouldn’t have done so were I the editor.
The pieces are balanced in their discussion of the ethics, but balance here seems inappropriate. Simply posing this as a debate is odd.
I don’t think any surgeon in America would have hesitated to provide the new heart to this man had the doctor been told ahead of time about the patient’s criminal record from over a generation ago. Sometimes, the bias of the media manifests itself where it sees controversy.
Check out this line from the Washington Post piece: “There are no laws or regulations prohibiting someone with a criminal history from receiving a transplant or an experimental procedure like the one Bennett had.”
It’s an ideological quirk of the Beltway media to note whenever something isn’t heavily regulated, as if total regulation, in which everything is either mandatory or prohibited, is the natural state of things. And in this age of social media and cancel culture, it’s sadly normal that anybody in the spotlight for any reason will have his entire past dragged into the spotlight.
Do you remember the college kid whose request for beer money on national television resulted in him raising $1 million for charity and then getting canceled by Busch Light because somebody dug up bad tweets he made as a teenager?
Or the dude in the red sweater, Ken Bone, who became famous as a regular voter, and so people dug up weird stuff he posted in online forums?
This happened enough that it got a weird shorthand: Milkshake Ducking.
The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) June 12, 2016
So, social media and cancel culture are one side of what’s going on here. But there’s a religious aspect to this all, too.
The idea, prominent among young left-leaning journalists, is that a “problematic” past should never be omitted from a story. The defenses of the Washington Post’s piece on the pig heart framed it as a media criticism. The bad stories, in this view, were the ones that didn’t show how the patient was no angel.
“She read story after story about the transplant. Her brother’s name was mentioned nowhere.”https://t.co/FdQgZca9ow Every word of this story by @lizziejohnsonnn & @thewanreport is powerful.
— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) January 13, 2022
This is hardly a left-wing thing, though. Conservatives have a really bad habit of getting very upset about bad people getting federal benefits. In Franco’s Spain, you needed a letter of good conduct to get a passport.
It reminds me of the Chinese “social credit” system, which may not strictly be the dystopian Big Brother system some of us feared but which is still scary. The articles that tell you not to worry too much about it call the social credit system “a fragmented set of programs used to enforce regulations, punish court judgement defaulters, and promote what authorities deem moral integrity among citizens.”
In the United States, that’s called the news media.
The idea is that your past offenses are always relevant, even when they have no bearing on the question at hand. It’s a religious dedication to “accountability.”
I have 10 godchildren. In order to be a godfather, I am supposed to be a “Catholic in good standing.” That means I need to be regularly attending Mass, not living in a persistent state of sin (such as having two wives), and have been to confession. In the current media religion, however, there is no confession because there is no absolution.
Your bad deeds should never be forgotten, in this worldview, and they should be considered before anyone gives you any benefit or accommodation. Pretty grim.
