Frequency Quarterly Website www.thenewatlantis.com First issue 2003 Based in Washington, D.C. | Language English OCLC number 56518547 Editor Adam Keiper | |
Publisher The Center for the Study of Technology and Society, The Ethics and Public Policy Center ISSN 1543-1215 (print); 1555-5569 (web) | ||
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 social conservative advocacy group the Ethics and Public Policy Center in partnership with the Center for the Study of Technology and Society. It is edited by Adam Keiper, who took over in 2007 from founding editor Eric Cohen.
Contents
The journal’s name is taken from Francis Bacon’s utopian novella 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." Writing for National Review, editor Adam Keiper described The New Atlantis as being written from a "particularly American and conservative way of thinking about both the blessings and the burdens of modern science and technology." New Atlantis authors and bioethicists publishing in other journals have also similarly referred to The New Atlantis as being written from a social conservative stance which utilizes religion.
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 has published widely on 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 has also published widely on the 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:
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; prominent scientists such as Raymond Tallis, Sara Seager, and Marcelo Gleiser; 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
Writing for the National Review in a 2003 column, the conservative author Stanley Kurtz described The New Atlantis as influential on thinking about science and technology.
Richard John Neuhaus, late 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 liberal 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."