South Dakota is rolling itself back to the "traditional" pre-Roe v. Wade policies of a time when legislators knew exactly what God's will was and exactly how everyone else should conduct themselves morally. Perhaps there are people out there who need their legislators to make their moral decisions for them, but I do not; I believe the legislators have plenty enough to worry about in keeping their own behavior moral. Apart from the abortion debate, policy makers have a responsibility in general to make just decisions based on evidence, logic, and universal principles, but it is astonishing how many ways legislators can screw up that profound responsibility. One of those ways is to subscribe so completely to a traditional mindset that they are unable to see entirely new circumstances that call for entirely new solutions. Such is the Frankenstein Effect: what was built by people to serve people takes on a life of its own, becoming a powerful entity that demands we serve it instead.
Government bureaucracy is the poster child of this -- whether justified or not. What had been constructed to serve the people bulked into a powerful force that is accused of bullying, exhausting, and imposing on them. Other examples of this type of thinking go far beyond sexual behavior and bureaucrats:
"Implementing any gun control is absolutely wrong, because it violates the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution." Ummm...what about the one hundred Americans dead each day from a gun? Even if the second amendment protects the individual's right to a gun, the law and even the Constitution can be changed. What is the ultimate authority -- the Constitution or the people it is supposed to protect?
"We cannot let our families try school vouchers to switch to better schools because that would be bad for our current school system." ....and the students?
Through the ages, moral codes were contrived entirely by humans for their health, justice, and welfare, often with a paper-mache Omniscience propped up next to them to create fearful compliance. Even if the ancient codes were shown to be obsolete or detrimental in some contemporary circumstances to the health, justice, and welfare of the people, obedience to the ancient code may somehow remain the priority.
In every case we suspect the Frankenstein Effect: we built the government, the Constitution, the school system, and the moral codes, but when powerful evidence arises that there are serious inadequacies and harm in the system, and the time comes to make careful and prudent improvements, the system we built demands we serve it rather than it serve us, and we choose to comply.
The Frankenstein Effect is especially dangerous in the realm of our moral codes, because our policy makers so frequently refer to their moral code when making critical decisions in legislation.
Despite assertions by some groups and traditions that their moral code is absolute for all peoples and all ages, there is no valid evidence for any other explanation but that all moral codes are purely human constructions, created by ordinary mortals, with no supernatural input whatsoever. The founders of these moral codes may have preferred, for many reasons, that people believed that their moral code was delivered from Omniscience, but their preference and insistence does not make it so. Nonetheless, we are assured that Hammurabi received his great Code from Shamash; Moses's from Yahweh; Muhammed's from Gabriel; Manu's from Svayambhuva; Joseph Smith's from the angel Moroni. ... The followers themselves may prefer to believe this is so -- but evidence to support that assertion, adequate to meet minimum criteria for any scientist or court, does not exist. You are supposed to take it on faith -- and that always means, of course, their faith, not yours. They will fill you in on other legal requirements of their faith later.
Why would founders and followers prefer a divine origin to their regulations of our personal behavior? Perhaps because this cows people into rapid adoption of and obedience to the code. Or because it seems to definitively settle any questions raised by dissenters, by ambiguous ethical dilemmas, changing circumstances, or new discoveries. Or because people feel special having a direct connection with and knowledge of the highest power in the universe. But this power, certainty, and authority is unearned, and it is an avoidance of the personal responsibility to grapple with difficult, changing, and conflicting ideas in the real world.
Moral absolutism may actually become an obstruction to implementing better solutions to social problems when we allow the Frankenstein Effect to take over. Consider the case of sex out of wedlock. Perhaps primitive societies discovered that villages that allowed for this had greater problems with young, underdeveloped girls suffering through childbirth, or single girls struggling as parents, or miserable with greater incidence of genital infection, etc. Cultural experimentation leads to the consensus that if young girls (and sometimes boys) are abstinent until in a socially binding and lifelong monogamous marriage, that the incidence of those problems is less. In a world in which medical cause and effect is unknown, "gods" are the explanation for the observed phenomena and abstinence becomes a part of a religiously enforced moral code.
As time, society, and technology advances, new solutions are discovered for those problems (birth control, condoms, abortion, antibiotics), and may also ameliorate some of the unsolved problems with the old solution (excessive repression, neurosis, emotional arrest). These new solutions can feel threatening to the institutions that have for so long made the old solution -- the traditional moral code -- such a part of their identity. Thus, the temples or churches oppose the new solutions even though one would expect them to embrace them as helpful in fighting the original problems: "Giving condoms to teenagers makes it easier for them to have sex outside of marriage without suffering the consequences of disease and undesired pregnancy, so they may choose to have sex when otherwise they wouldn't have, so giving condoms to teenagers is bad." This is the Frankenstein Effect: suddenly, these helpful new innovations are themselves denounced as immoral, as if the whole point were to preserve the church traditions rather than to preserve personal health and welfare. The moral code and the institution -- originally built by people to solve specific problems -- become forces that demand people serve the codes and the institutions instead, regardless of the original problems.
Embryonic stem cells can make a blind man see (see Michael Abrams, "Sight Unseen", in DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 06) -- and this has been done in the U.S. and over one hundred times in Japan -- but some religious institutions, forgetting that doing the same thing used to be a celebrated act in their tradition -- condemn any such healing.
Tradition, momentum, and blind obedience to authority -- governmental, religious, institutional -- lobotomizes the body politic, leaving it with an unthinking automaton to bully us with ideas that may be entirely remote from us in time, culture, geography, and circumstances. We may choose to flee from our freedom and responsibility to think for ourselves and let our forebears dictate to us with the Frankenstein Effect, or we may select from our heritage what remains instructive and relevant, and carefully modifying it for a contemporary world, courageously meet our responsibility to advance civilization.