Hey, everyone is Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Michael Hanby, who writes on science and philosophy. You know, I wanted to

bring him on because so many important issues are facing us through the different kind of

birth technologies and genetic technologies. In the 1950s, a very famous literary critic named

Lionel Trilling wrote a book in which he said this.

He said, in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the only

intellectual tradition. It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary

ideas in general circulation. The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some

isolated exceptions, express themselves in ideas, but only in action or an irritable mental

gestures, which seek to resemble ideas. I don't know if that was true in the 1950s, but I can tell

you that it's true now of the left. I really do not believe there

are any ideas coming out of the left. You know, when you talk about men can become women or,

you know, they're trying to bring back some kind of socialism, which has failed everywhere.

You're really talking about people who are fantasizing and like Trilling said of conservatives

in his day, there's just irritable mental

gestures, be quiet, you're a racist and all these things. That means that the intellectual

arguments on the right, if I can call it the right, or at least traditionalist and conservative

ideas, are the only ideas in town, and that makes it all the more important that we discuss

the things that we disagree about. And one of those things is about the future

of transhumanism, of birth, of where, of genetics. And Michael Hanby is an associate professor

of religion and philosophy of science at the John Paul Second Institute at the Catholic

University of America. And I've been reading his pieces, and he writes about these issues

brilliantly, so I wanted you to meet him and hear what he has to say. Michael, thank you so

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