Take a look around, and you'll see that we are already altering our minds and bodies in ways that are quite different from the generations that have preceded us. Public approval of "aesthetic surgery" has grown 50 percent in the United States during the past decade. Even teenage girls are having breast enhancement operations. Many parents are desperately trying to direct and control the lives of their children by getting them into the right schools, the right professions, and the right income brackets through expensive programs and strategies designed to insure success. According to Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer and visiting scholar at Middlebury College, these developments are precursors to the oncoming age of genetic engineering, advanced robotics, and nanotechnology. The author of The End of Nature and Hope, Human and Wild makes a bold suggestion, especially for these let's move full throttle ahead no matter what the costs times: he urges restraint, a setting of limits on our desires. This is a very spiritual approach to the age of technology and one which goes against the grain of the consumer culture. Bravo!

McKibben begins with his ethical criticism of genetic engineering and "designer babies." As early as 1993, a March of Dimes poll found that 43 percent of Americans would engage in genetic engineering "simply to enhance their children's looks or intelligence." The author quotes Lee Silver, a Princeton scientist: "Why not seize this power? Why not control what has been left to chance in the past?" The author is more specific: "If you can buy your kid three years at Deerfield, four at Harvard, and three more at Harvard Law, why shouldn't you be able to turbocharge his IQ a bit?" Of course, this option will widen the already gigantic chasm between the haves and the have-nots in America and around the world. The designer babies phenomenon could result in what McKibben calls a splitting of humanity into hereditary castes. Even more scary, the ethicist in McKibben wonders whether those who decide not to jack up the IQ and physical abilities of their children will be seen by their offspring and others as practitioners of child abuse.

And there's more to worry and wonder about. "Even as the genetic engineers work busily to upgrade us, adding IQ and memory. the robotic engineers are hard at work making sure we'll be surpassed, and the nanotechnologists to make sure all our wants will be satisfied by pushing buttons," writes the author. McKibben salutes the Amish for their strategies to contain technology by picking and choosing among innovations. He concurs with Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and other religious leaders who hallow the mystery and the otherness of all human beings. Wendell Berry adds his voice to those who want to ward off "a posthuman future."

McKibben points to nonviolence and the wilderness movement as two examples of "setting sharp boundaries on where we're going and how we'll get there." He concludes by lifting up restraint and renunciation as the best antidotes to giving in to the full force of our ever accelerating desires. The world's religious traditions point out the sanity of this practice. But all those who join this countercultural movement are sure to find themselves viewed as traitors to consumerism and the American way of progress through technological growth.