However, the most important thing to remember is that we shouldn’t get too obsessive about anything, be that knowledge, life itself, or some other thing. As the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle knew, the route to a good life and to happiness lies in finding the right balance between the extremes.
The pursuit of knowledge is fine as long as it is just one of many activities that make up our lives. And so with everything else. It is fine as long as it does not become an obsession to weaken our affections and destroy our taste for what life has to offer us. Then, and only then, will it become “unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.” That is what happens to Frankenstein. He postpones his own life to pursue a specter, in his case the specter of an eternal life.
Victor Frankenstein’s life is a failure not so much because his creature does not turn out the way he conceived it, but rather because he fails to see that eternity can be found only in the present, in the here and now. The secret of happiness is the discovery that our native town is the world, and that whatever we may find when we venture beyond its boundaries, it is not likely to make our lives any better.
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Victor Frankenstein in the Twenty-First Century
DANILO CHAIB
Today a real Frankenstein walks among us. I realized this in May 2010 when I was taking the subway in London and read in the newspaper Metro:
Maverick Frankenstein Scientist Creates Artificial Life.1
I thought: “Whaaaaat?” Could it be just the sensationalist press trying to get attention? But then, in another newspaper the next day I read: “Frankenstein’s Lab creates Life in a Test Tube.”2 “OMG,” I thought, “Is this for real? Who is this Frankenstein anyway? Is he a philosophical clone of Victor Frankenstein? Is he going to fashion a creature and let it loose in the world, only worrying about the consequences when it’s too late?”
Conspiracy Theory!
“It’s Alive! It’s Alive!” cried Craig Venter, along with his team of biologists of the J. Craig Venter Institute3 in May 2010. The speech was published by the famous TED series.4 “Perhaps it’s a giant philosophical change in how we view life,” said Craig Venter about his creation of a living bacterium with synthetic DNA. Craig went on to explain that the practical implications of this new life form could help society in ecological matters: “Also, at Synthetic Genomics, we’ve been working on major environmental issues. I think this latest oil spill in the Gulf is a reminder.”
But how, we wonder, can these little bacteria help us with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Now, let’s fast forward to November 2010, when British celebrity Stephen Fry appeared in a video posted by the BBC on a page dedicated to the oil spill entitled “Has the Oil Really Gone?” Stephen Fry and Mark Cawardine asked Mike Utsler, COO Gulf Coast Restoration, BP, whether it was really accurate to state that the vast majority of the oil spilled by the Deepwater Horizon had been successfully dispersed. The answer Mr. Utsler provided was really the seed of countless blogs to say that Frankenstein’s monster was actually on the loose: “The oil plume is actually disappearing, the plume is biodegrading, there is a new form of microbiology that is attacking this plume and using it as a food source.” Whaaaaat?
To add more scariness to this scenario, just after Utsler uttered those words, some “staff men” showed up and said that he could no longer stay for the remainder of the interview. But, hey, what’s so polemical about all this? What drives so many curious nerds to endlessly discuss on blogs the consequences of a new life form on the loose? Apparently, this new life form was created to help society, isn’t that right?
What’s the problem with creating new life to help us? That was exactly, you might remember, what Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was about, what the “Modern Prometheus” was doing. For Shelley, we can pave Hell with good intentions, but not Heaven . . . or Earth. The same thought is brought to light by philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas believes that inequalities and injustices can actually go away in our society, but not when science is dictating the dominant ideology. Rather, the improvement should be in the human heart, on a moral level. For Habermas, we already have the tools to reach an egalitarian society, where morality is always a dynamic value, being constructed every day by social relations.
The Habermas Corpus
The huge monster in Shelley’s novel doesn’t have a name. In our case, the little artificial bacterium created by Venter does. Many biologists started to call the first being having an entirely synthetic genome by the nickname “Synthia.” Habermas argues against creations like Synthia, especially in his 2003 book The Future of Human Nature, which voices a criticism against human cloning and other practices promoted by the idea of liberal eugenics.
Liberal eugenics advocates the use of reproductive and genetic technologies where the choice of enhancing human characteristics and capacities is left to the individual preferences of parents acting as consumers, rather than the public health policies of the state. From this idea, a bio-social movement had sprung, defending practices that would improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population, but without the intervention of public opinion or the state. Habermas criticizes the philosophical and moral intentions of scientists who claim that they’re doing research in order to improve humanity for the better. Do you remember Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s book? He was obsessed with helping society, but without really interacting with society itself.
Craig Venter claims to be helping society too. We can actually see those claims two years before Synthia had been born, in a video published by TED in March 2008.5 In this video, at time 14:42, we can see Craig Venter showing a slide to the public, explaining that the future uses of synthetic and engineered species are to: 1. increase basic understanding of life; 2. replace the petrol-chemical industry; 3. become a major source of energy; 4. enhance Bioremediation; and 5. drive antibiotic and vaccine discovery and production.
All of Venter’s predictions worry Habermas. He thinks liberal eugenics is a threat to the foundations of the human moral community. He also argues that liberal eugenics will fundamentally alter relationships in the moral community, since with it reproduction will change from a natural process of creation to an artificial process of manufacture. That manufacture will undermine moral equality, and thereby human rights. And, as a result, liberal eugenics will undermine individual freedom and autonomy. For Habermas, what seems good for society (as Victor Frankenstein thought when creating his monster) is actually, as Mary Shelley explained in her book, an irresponsible act, leading innocents like Justine to suffer the injustice of a horrible death as a consequence of the uncontrollable behavior of Frankenstein’s monster.
Good Synthetic Intentions
Craig Venter, still on TED’s presentation, gives us more clues of why he is producing synthetic life: “Why do this?” asks Craig Venter at minute 10:45 of the video. He continues:
I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. We’re about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next forty years. To put it into context for myself: I was born in 1946. There are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946; within forty years, there’ll be four. We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It’s going to be a stretch to do it for nine. We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion-plus barrels of oil—that’s a hundred million barrels a day. When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it’s going to be a huge challenge. Then of course, there’s all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere.
Habermas’s retort is that, everything Craig Venter says above is sustained by a group of ideas that justify society as it is. But this paradigm works for society as it is, and doesn’t look for any structural social transformation. But what if countries decide to change their policies, and have a huge worldwide agrarian reform? It’s known that much of the land owned by the cattle industry
in Brazil, for example, could be used to create little villages, each one sustained by their own agricultural production. This ultimately would decrease the immigration from small cities to big cities, like São Paulo (with more than twenty million people). People unemployed in big cities would eventually find employment in small cities and miserable areas in big cities, like the “favelas” (slums) could disappear.
This solution, to share land to solve the problem of poverty was actually proposed in a book by Thomas More (1478–1535). The book is about a little island where equality was finally achieved by its inhabitants. The island’s name gave the book its title, Utopia. Although criticized for being unrealistic, many arguments in this book are actually prevalent even today, and many philosophers have tried to bring that distant island within our horizon. More’s book seems to be the opposite of the dystopian vision gifted to us by Mary Shelley, but perhaps there is a reason for some hope.
What’s true for many philosophers, including Habermas, is that the growth of world population is not something “natural” and “unstoppable.” It is instead a symptom of the inequalities that persist in a society centered on the individual, the same society that drove Victor Frankenstein away from his loved ones in pursuit of his own selfish and egotistical aims. Music teacher and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, agreed with More, saying that lands and cattle are the primary private property and the seed for all inequality. Rousseau imagined that the first person, who, after enclosing a piece of land, took it in to his head to say, “This is mine,” and found people ignorant enough to believe it, was the true founder of the society for which Craig Venter is justifying his acts. Rousseau wonders: “How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that person who said ‘This is mine’ have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong equally to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody!”
So basically, for More, Rousseau, and Habermas, the way to eradicate hunger is not “more food!” Among the practices in the food industry to keep up the price of the product is to control the quantity. There are several cases of food being wasted while confined in storehouses in order stop the decrease in price for the products. Robert H. Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell University, affirmed in 2009 that paying farmers not to grow crops was a substitute for agricultural “price support programs.” The “price support program meant” that farmers had to incur the expense of plowing their fields, fertilizing, irrigating, spraying, and harvesting them, and then selling their crops to the government, which stored them in silos until they either rotted or were consumed by rodents. According to Robert Frank, it was much cheaper just to pay farmers not to grow the crops in the first place.6
If those practices from both government and farmers are real, then the problem of hunger in the world is not scarcity of food. Shelley’s Frankenstein actually developed the same argument and excuse to create “synthetic life” as Craig Venter. Victor Frankenstein wanted to free mankind from disease and natural death: “what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!”
This hope justified his production of a new life form; but when he finally achieved his goal, instead of giving love to the creature, he abandoned it. Victor’s abandonment of his creation reveals that he never really cared about society. He wanted personal gain, and he then realized too late that his creature wouldn’t fulfill his ambitions. Mary Shelley was the daughter of a philosopher, founder of the feminist movement worldwide, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Shelley’s mother wrote books such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she writes that women should participate more actively in history. Shelley knew then, that a character isolated from society, like Victor Frankenstein, and at the same time obsessed with helping the very society he ignored, would never have the courage to face such a different creature! Victor was not used to dealing with different people; he had no education in understanding other cultures. And so he had to abandon the creature and save himself, because he could not accept anything so different from himself.
Despite all the melancholic drama perpetrated by Victor Frankenstein and his whining throughout Shelley’s book, he is seen as a villain by many, as depicted in the comic books series published by DC Comics, Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. There, the “creature” actually leads a group of super-humans fight against many villains, of which the most powerful villain is, guess who? Victor Frankenstein, of course! He is there, as a bloody villain threatening the world with biotechnology. There are people who interpret Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein as a villain for imposing his egoistic wishes upon nature. Most people make the moral judgment that, when we interfere in another person’s life and make this life worse, this is wrong. This morality is well depicted in a hilarious Tim Burton’s version of Frankenstein, Frankenweenie.
Be Your Own Frankenstein
Let’s give you the opportunity to create your own synthetic life form. What would you like to create? A bacterium? A protozoa? A fish? A dinosaur? Or maybe, would you like to reincarnate someone? Like your beloved doggy? Tim Burton did this twice, actually. In 1984, he filmed Frankenweenie, as the ad for the film said, “A Comic Twist on a Classic Tail.” More than twenty-five years later, in 2012, Burton re-animated Frankenweenie and got nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Frankenweenie, in a really smart way, evidences Habermas’s point of view, even using Victor Frankenstein as the hero. This time Victor is a boy who loves his doggy Sparky and does everything to be with him (even bringing the doggy back from the dead). However, many school colleagues of Victor’s learn his techniques, and in order to win a science competition, they start to bring other dead pets back to life. Things don’t go well, as every animal they try to reincarnate turns out to be evil. The logic of the movie is clear: If you don’t have love, your creations will turn against you and against others, as well.
It’s not just that you have to care about your creation and then your creation will care about you. It’s more than that. You have to care about the interactions your creation will have with others. It’s no wonder that, at the end of Frankenweenie (Spoiler alert!!) Sparky, Victor’s creature, saves everyone from the evil pets! There is a morality in Sparky that motivates him to care about others. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) pointed out that the life of a human being proceeds only on the condition that there is interaction with other human beings: For human beings, “to live” means—according to the expression in Latin, “to be among men” (inter homines esse), and to die, “to cease to be among men.” In other words, the verb “to live” can’t be seen as singular: to live is always plural.
It’s Alive! It’s Aliiive . . . and Controlled—(Really?)
Craig Venter in an interview in Time magazine in July 2012, praised Shelley’s Frankenstein. Apparently he is writing a book on synthetic life and going through all the history of “Vitalism”, a theory which posits that living things are materially different from nonliving things, and tries to explain the background to that kind of thinking. Venter said that this was first clearly articulated by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein.7
The reporter was surprised by Venter’s raising the topic of Shelley’s book, and took the opportunity to ask Venter what we have discussed throughout this chapter: about the laws of unintended consequences! Venter answered that when his team cried “It’s Aliiive!” in May 2012 and made their announcement of having created synthetic life in the laboratory, President Obama himself asked his new commission to look at this issue. This commission’s report stressed that Venter and his colleagues are building components to be able to terminate or limit the spread of any new life form.
As an example, Venter menti
oned the tens of millions of experiments that he has been doing since the 1970s, like putting genes of every organism into E. coli in laboratories, and declared that there’s never been a problem. The reason for this is that the laboratory E. coli has a chemical dependency. It can’t survive outside the special lab medium. So, Synthia is under control! Conspiracy theorists would respond: Really? Have you never heard of chaos theory, Craig Venter? Or better yet, have you never seen any horror movies? It always starts with someone saying “Everything’s under control” and then suddenly, Frankenstein’s monster is pulling the heart out of the body of some innocent little girl!
If You Want Immortality, Do Something Meaningful During Your Life—(Really?)
Victor Frankenstein went in search of immortality, and accordingly to Venter, he found it. Venter categorically says that if you want immortality, you should do something meaningful during your lifetime. Victor Frankenstein did something meaningful in his lifetime: a ‘scientific act’ that set a monster loose and killed his entire family and friends. Well, this type of immortality, apart from making a good gothic novel, doesn’t seem so great. What is meaningful, really? Is the love of Tim Burton’s Victor for his dog meaningful? The attitude towards life and society should be considered by everybody in their actions.
As Habermas sees it, the problem is not genetic engineering itself, but the mode and scope of its use. In a world with wars, hunger, and social inequality, science should focus on changing the structure of society rather than the individual. The program of liberal eugenics blinds itself to this task because it ignores how biotechnology can be used collectively, serving society as a whole, rather than doing what Victor Frankenstein did, isolating himself from society, and trying to “cure” a society that he never interacted with and maybe never even really loved.
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 3