Leon Kass
Leon Richard Kass is an American physician, biochemist, educator, and public intellectual. Kass is best known as a proponent of liberal arts education via the "Great Books," as a critic of human cloning, life extension, euthanasia and embryo research, and for his tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."
Kass is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Senior Fellow Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Dean of the Faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem. His books include Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs; The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature; Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics; The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis; and What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song.
"For his students and readers," Yuval Levin summarizes, "Leon Kass has laid out a path of inquiry showing that those questions that bedevil us most today have been with us for countless generations, and have to do not with the latest modern excess, but with man’s unchanging nature, wants, needs, and potential. It is a path...that opens with a question: How does man thrive?"
Early life and education
Kass was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He described his family as "Yiddish speaking, secular, and socialist." Although his upbringing was not religious, it was moralist: "Morality, not Judaism, was the religion of our home, morality colored progressively pink with socialism, less on grounds of Marxist theory, more out of zeal for social justice and human dignity." He would not begin to explore his religious heritage until later in his career.Kass enrolled in the University of Chicago at age 15, graduating from the college with a degree in biology in 1958. The college was well known for its extensive core curriculum, and Kass studied the "great books" then prescribed by Chicago's core. "I became a devotee of liberal education... with a special fondness for the Greeks." He graduated from the University of Chicago's medical school in 1962 and, following an internship in medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, completed a PhD in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1967, working in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Konrad Bloch. Around this time Kass began to develop an interest in morality in medicine and in bio medical ethics, instigated partly as a result of reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.
In 1961, Kass married the former Amy Apfel, a fellow graduate of the College of the University of Chicago. As instructors in the college in later years, they would frequently teach seminars together. Their scholarly collaborations include several articles on marriage and courtship and a reader on the subject. In 2011, they published a joint project, What So Proudly We Hail, that uses literature to examine the American soul. Amy Kass died of complications from ovarian cancer and leukemia on August 19, 2015.
Leon and Amy Kass went to Holmes County, Mississippi, during the summer of 1965 to do civil rights work. Working with the Medical Community for Human Rights and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Kasses "lived with a farmer couple in the Mount Olive community, in a house with no telephone, hot water, or indoor toilet. They visited many families in the community, participated in their activities, and helped with voter registration and other efforts to encourage the people to organize themselves in defense of their rights." Later that fall, Kass wrote a letter to his family and friends detailing his and his wife's experiences and appealing to them to donate to the Civil Rights Movement.
The character of the rural, poor, and uneducated African Americans with whom they lived and worked contrasted with his colleagues at Harvard and other elite universities. It was this experience, he later said, that
caused me to shed my enlightenment faith and ultimately begin a journey in which Jewish thought would ultimately come to play a more prominent part. Why, I wondered then, was there more honor, decency, and dignity among the impoverished and ignorant but church-going black farmers with whom we had lived than among my privileged and educated fellow graduate students at Harvard, whose progressive opinions I shared but whose self-absorption and self-indulgence put me off. If poverty and superstition were the cause of bad character, how to explain this?
First forays into bioethics
After completing his doctorate, Kass conducted molecular biology research for the National Institutes of Health, authoring several scientific papers while serving in the U.S. Public Health Service. His early interest in bioethics was stimulated by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, both of which he read at the suggestion of Harvey Flaumenhaft. In these books, Kass saw examples of "how the scientific project to master nature could, if we are not careful, lead to our dehumanization, via eugenics, drug-induced contentment, and other transformations of human nature, possibilities already foreseeable in the new biology.... Will man remain a creature made in the image of God, aspiring to align himself with the divine, or will he become an artifact created by man in the image of God-knows-what, fulfilling the aspirations only of human will?... I soon shifted my career from doing science to thinking about its human meaning."In 1967, Kass read an article by Joshua Lederberg in the Washington Post suggesting that humans could one day be cloned, permitting the perpetuation of the genotypes of geniuses. In a letter to the editor, Kass made a moral case against cloning and suggested that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him." Thus began a second career of writing on bioethics, including essays on organ transplantation, genetic screening, in vitro fertilization, cloning, the conquest of aging, assisted suicide, medical ethics, and biotechnology. Kass was also involved in founding the Hastings Center. In 1970, he left the laboratory at NIH to become the executive director of the Committee on Life Sciences and Social Policy at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, which produced the first public document that tried to assess the ethical and social consequences of the coming advances in biotechnology.
Teaching experience
As he moved from biology to bioethics, Kass also moved from full-time research into teaching, first at St. John's College from 1972 to 1976, Georgetown University from 1974 to 1976, and at Chicago from 1976 onward. At St. John's, Kass taught in the Great Books program as well as in-depth studies of Aristotle's De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics and Darwin's On the Origin of Species. At the University of Chicago, Kass taught courses across the humanities and sciences, including both undergraduate and graduate seminars in the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato's Symposium and Meno, Lucretius, human passions, science and society, Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Genesis, Darwinism, Descartes's Discourse on the Method, classical geometry, Tolstoy's War and Peace, marriage and courtship, Exodus, and biotechnology.Along with his wife and other colleagues, Kass cofounded in 1977 the "Human Being and Citizen" common core course at Chicago, today the most popular humanities core course at Chicago, devoted to exploring the conflicts between conceptions of what constitutes a good human being/individual versus the demands that society or the State tries to impose upon us. In 1983, he, Allan Bloom, and James M. Redfield founded the "Fundamentals: Issues and Texts" program. Kass taught in and chaired this program for eighteen years. He won the University of Chicago's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1983 and the Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching in 1993.
Views on rape
In his 1992 article "Regarding Daughters and Sisters", an examination of the Biblical story of Dinah, Kass writes that "rape is a capital offense, a crime worse even than murder. For the rapist, says the book of Deuteronomy, 'death by stoning.' It has never seemed to me too cruel or excessive a punishment." However, he criticizes the modern conception of rape "as a violation of the will, not a violation of womanliness." Womanliness, for Kass, requires modesty rather than power. He concludes:Many lonely women, more than can safely admit it, secretly hope to meet a gentleman; but the vast majority steadfastly refuse to be ladies—indeed, no longer know what it means. Small wonder, then, so much sexual harassment and even rape. When power becomes the name of the game, the stronger will get his way.
Under such circumstances, one cannot exactly blame women for wanting to learn how to defend themselves against sexual attack. But, addressing the symptom not the cause, the remedies of karate and “take back the night”—and, still more, the shallow beliefs about sexual liberation that support these practices—can only complete the destruction of healthy relations between man and woman. For, truth to tell, the night never did and never can belong to women, except for the infamous women-of-the-night. Only a restoration of sexual self-restraint and sexual self-respect—for both men and women—can reverse our rapid slide toward Schechem.