The New Atlantis (journal)

The New Atlantis

File:The New Atlantis Cover - Summer 2012.jpg
Editor	Adam Keiper
Frequency	Quarterly
Publisher	The Center for the Study of Technology and Society, The Ethics and Public Policy Center, The Witherspoon Institute
First issue	2003 (2003)
Based in	Washington, D.C.
Language	English
Website	www.thenewatlantis.com
ISSN	1543-1215 (print) 1555-5569 (web)
OCLC number	56518547

The New Atlantis, founded in 2003, is a quarterly journal about the social, ethical, political, and policy dimensions of modern science and technology. The journal is published in Washington, D.C. by the Center for the Study of Technology and Society in partnership with the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Witherspoon Institute. It is edited by Adam Keiper, who took over in 2007 from founding editor Eric Cohen.

The journal’s name is taken from Francis Bacon’s utopian short story New Atlantis, which the journal’s editors describe as a "fable of a society living with the benefits and challenges of advanced science and technology." An editorial in the inaugural issue states that the aim of the journal is "to help us avoid the extremes of euphoria and despair that new technologies too often arouse; and to help us judge when mobilizing our technological prowess is sensible or necessary, and when the preservation of things that count requires limiting the kinds of technological power that would lessen, cheapen, or ultimately destroy us."

Subjects

The New Atlantis tends to publish views in favor of technological innovation but wary of certain avenues of development. For example, the journal has generally advocated nuclear energy; space exploration and development through public-private partnerships, including manned missions to Mars; biofuels; and genetically modified foods. But it has expressed ambivalent or critical views about developments in synthetic biology and military technologies like drones, chemical weapons, and cyberwarfare. Articles often explore policy questions on these and other issues, sometimes advocating particular policy outcomes, especially on health care, environmental management, and energy.

The journal is perhaps most widely known for its work in bioethics, including issues such as stem cell research, assisted reproduction, cloning, assisted suicide, organ and tissue donation, the purported link between vaccines and autism, and informed consent. Articles on these issues often highlight the potential for dangerous or degrading developments, including concerns over human dignity, with many articles examining human enhancement, and life extension, and historical precedents for abuse in eugenics and population control.

The journal also features broader philosophical reflections on science and technology, and tends to be skeptical of what its authors consider to be speculative overreach common in popular discussions. Examples include articles that have defended the existence of free will in light of developments in neuroscience, questioned the wisdom of using brain scans in courtrooms, and described how growing knowledge of epigenetics has undermined common claims about genetic determinism. While the journal has sometimes aired libertarian views about human enhancement and transhumanism, its contributors generally tend to question whether technologies like artificial intelligence, "friendly" artificial intelligence, and genetic enhancement are possible or desirable. The journal also publishes the Futurisms blog, dedicated to criticizing transhumanism.

The journal is also well known for its work on the personal and interpersonal effects of the Internet and digital technology. It has featured articles on subjects like Facebook, cell phones, multitasking, e-readers, GPS and navigation, and virtual reality. A 2006 article by Matthew B. Crawford advocating the intellectual and economic virtues of the manual trades was noted as a best-of-the-year essay by New York Times columnist David Brooks, and was subsequently expanded into the bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft. The journal also frequently publishes essays on philosophical and literary questions relating to science and technology.

Book Series

The New Atlantis also publishes a book series, New Atlantis Books, an imprint of Encounter Books. To date, six books have been released:

• In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology ISBN 9781594032080 (2008), by Eric Cohen
• Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy ISBN 9781594032097 (2008), by Yuval Levin
• Neither Beast nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person ISBN 9781594032578 (2009), by Gilbert Meilaender
• Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism ISBN 9781594034763 (2012), by Robert Zubrin
• Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America ISBN 9781594037160 (2014), edited by Wilfred M. McClay and Ted. V. McAllister
• Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress ISBN 9781594037368 (2014), by Charles T. Rubin

Contributors

Among the more notable contributors to the journal are physicians and bioethicists such as President’s Council on Bioethics chairman Leon Kass and neuroscientist William B. Hurlbut; political scientists, legal and ethical scholars, and policy analysts such as Yuval Levin, Robert P. George, Peter Augustine Lawler, Diana Schaub, Charles T. Rubin, Jeffrey Rosen, Larry Arnhart, and Jonathan B. Tucker; think-tank scholars such as Nicholas Eberstadt, Roger Bate, Henry Sokolski, and Robert D. Atkinson; space experts and entrepreneurs such as Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, James C. Bennett, and Jeff Foust; and philosophers, historians, authors, and journalists such as Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Matthew B. Crawford, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay, Ross Douthat, Victor Davis Hanson, Alan Jacobs, Varadaraja V. Raman, Stephen D. Snobelen, Andrew Janiak, William R. Newman, and Ronald Bailey.

Reception

The New Atlantis is considered influential on conservative thinking about science and technology by commentators on both the left and the right.

Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the conservative journal First Things, wrote that The New Atlantis is "as good a publication as there is for the intelligent exploration of questions in bioethics and projections—promising, ominous, and fantastical—about the human future," and a writer in The American Conservative described the journal as a source "of fresh ideas on the Right." National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg described The New Atlantis as "a new and interesting magazine" that "seems to be trying to carve out the space for the government to stop the more offensive aspects of biotechnology."

By contrast, the progressive bioethicist Jonathan D. Moreno has said that the journal offers "a very dark vision" about science and technology, but that it "makes an important point about the need to worry about the ends as well as means in science" and that its "writers were young, smart, and had a good understanding of the political process and the making of public policy." Bioethicist Ruth Macklin criticized The New Atlantis as representative of a conservative movement in bioethics that is "mean-spirited, mystical, and emotional" and that "claims insight into ultimate truth yet disavows reason."

The journal has particularly gained a reputation among the transhumanist movement for its criticism of human enhancement. James Hughes, a techno-progressivist and at times director of organizations such as the World Transhumanist Association and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, notes that the journal "has published influential attacks on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, reproductive technology, and life extension." Natasha Vita-More has described it as a "journal known as a ring of bioconservatives bent on opposing the cyberculture," while the Extropy Institute has called it "a high-powered rallying point for the neo-Luddites."