 illustration by A.J. Garces |
is a flirt and a
rapist. It teases with seductive possibilities for the future, provokes our
fantasies, then suddenly overpowers us — impregnating the entire race with
something new, unwanted, and frightening. We give birth in a state of
violation. To make sense of it is, for some, an exercise in futility, for
others a leap of faith; nobody’s answer quite works for anybody else. There is
nothing to do but go on, yet how?
But the metaphor of history-as-rapist describes our feelings more than our
circumstances. Victims of actual rape are truly victims; victims of history’s
metaphorical rapes are involved in a collective process for which they are
partly responsible. For we are history. It is we who have the fantasies,
and we who tease and provoke them into reality. It is we who accumulate and
store the foundation of knowledge and experience from which a few among us
invent the new — and it is we who are always crying out for the new, so these
inventions come at our invitation. It is we who turn away while others act, and
we who act while others turn away: both the turning away and the act combine to
create the circumstances that make for a change drastic enough to be called
“historical.”
Then, whether it is a political revolution, as in Russia; a revolution in
what’s acceptable, as happened in America in the 1960s; or a technical
revolution like the automobile, the atom bomb, television, the computer —
however our fantasies and desires come to life, once they manifest they are
always more than we bargained for. We create and/or allow them, then stand
before them trembling; for we know that now they will turn upon us and
re-create us in ways we can not imagine. Nothing will ever be the same,
and there’s no place to hide.
A month ago, all but a few scientists said that the cloning of adult mammals
was impossible. Now a sheep named after a buxom singer has become a milestone
in history — a living symbol that, once more, the rules have changed. Fantasy
has been cloned into reality.
Human cloning comes next. Everyone knows nothing can stop it. The English
scientist who engineered all this, Ian Wilmut, claims never to have considered
the possibility of cloning humans; he is either astonishingly na�ve or a
liar. Even Nature, the generally tight-lipped publication that published
his findings, had to admit: “Cloning of humans from adults’ tissues is likely
to be achievable any time from one to 10 years from now.” That’s a careful way
of saying that the techniques are here, and somebody just has to do it (if it
hasn’t been done in secret already).
Our response? Comical and contradictory, as usual. Jewish, Catholic, and
Protestant officials are against it. One Islamic spokesman said “Knowledge is
bestowed on us by God,” so there should be no limits to research; another said
“The human body is God’s property, not man’s laboratory,” so research should be
banned. (The Dalai Lama is keeping his mouth shut, with a smile no doubt). A
professor named Nancey Murphy actually said in The New York Times: “The main
thing to worry about is whether our culture has its priorities well enough
thought out.” (Our culture? Priorities?) And a biologist called Ursula
Goodenough — what a name! — claimed to be joking when she said now “there’d
be no need for men.” The nervous males who run our media featured Ms.
Goodenough’s comment in all the first reports.
Experts have been dependably useless. Harold E. Varmus, director of the
National Institute of Health, assures us that “it’s very hard to do this
stuff,” so don’t worry, human cloning is far in the future. Meanwhile
Time reported that cloning “is an elegant, simple procedure” and “any
skilled lab technician should be able to master it.”
The politicians behaved exactly like politicians. A House Republican
introduced a bill to ban human cloning research in the United States. President
Clinton formed a committee to decide whether cloning’s ethical or not (we can
only hope its not the same committee who decided the ethics of his
fundraising). He also temporarily banned public funding for research, while
asking private enterprise to “refrain.” (We all know how good private
enterprise is at refraining.) Clinton’s move means: a) Some Third World country
will perfect human cloning before America; and/or b) The Pentagon wants to keep
clone research to itself and secret.
In response to all this confusion, scientists who’ve been telling us for years
that all aspects of life are determined by DNA, are now falling all over each
other to tell us how important “experience” is in forming human behavior. Let’s
see: When you want funding, you talk about DNA; when you want people not to
fuck with your right to experiment, you talk about experience. These people are
shameless — but anybody who’s heard of the atom bomb already knows that.
As for the “ethicists” (How do you become an ethicist?), they’re in Never
Never Land. Rocco Buttiglione, described as “an Italian academic close to Pope
John Paul II,” said: “A person is not an object.” While Jeremy Rifkin, a writer
much milked by our big-wig publications, said: “For the first time, we’ve taken
the principles of industrial design — quality control, predictability — and
applied them to a human being.”
For the first time?! Every day, all over the world, most of its
five-plus billion people are treated like objects according to “principles of
industrial design.” From the sweatshops of Asia to the corporate corridors of
America, from your local McDonald’s to the fluorescent halls of your nearest
mall, people work as cogs, objects, faceless parts of a massive process:
granted no rights to decide policy, unable to speak their minds without fear
for their livelihood, their days effectively regulated from the moment they
wake up to the moment they get home from work. Many large companies in America
now require both psychological and physical tests before granting employment —
and people with much fear and not much pride accede to such tests. The
fundamental requirement for employment is to be clever but docile. We are
nervous about cloning because most of us are already being treated like
clones.
And most are fearful enough, cowards enough, to allow it.
We have reason to fear cloning. People who pay children less than a dollar for
a 10-hour day sewing athletic shoes are perfectly capable of running
human-clone farms for organ transplants. And people who buy those canvas shoes,
knowing how they are made, are capable of purchasing organs from clone-farms if
their lives are in danger — capable of dehumanizing cloned humans to the point
where they are mere products to be consumed. For consumption is the true
“ethic” of our age, and we are its perpetrators as well as its victims. Cloning
makes us afraid, but why? We are afraid of the future because we are afraid of
the present.
Which is to say: We are afraid of ourselves.
One of the few cogent comments I came across about cloning was by a rabbi
named Moshe Tendler (whose people have already been used for medical
experiments): “The real problem is whenever man has shown mastery over man, it
has always meant the enslavement of man.”
And, yes, there are egomaniacs who cherish a fantasy of
immortality-through-DNA, replicating themselves with clones. And, yes, there
are wackos who think DNA alone might suffice to recreate an Albert Einstein, a
Thomas Jefferson, a Toni Morrison. Nonsense. The variables that create a human
being are countless and unpredictable, and go far beyond DNA. Geniuses, like
everybody else, do not grow up in controlled environments; it’s impossible to
catalogue their influences, much less how a specific input created a specific
output. Still, if such a thing can be attempted, somewhere, somehow, it will be
— or has been. But Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, is the
great prophet of our age: Every invention has turned upon us unpredictably, and
invented humans will have unpredictable consequences too.
The history of technology has been that we can make things, but we can’t
control them. Life keeps insisting that it does not exist to be controlled, but
to be lived. Every attempt at control creates some unpredictable element that
sooner or later disrupts control. (This will happen to corporate domination as
it has to everything else; it is just a matter of time.)
When asked about human cloning, Mario Cuomo said: “Living with the accumulated
knowledge of all your imperfections, it would be hard to want to reproduce
yourself and then have the arrogance to face the God who will judge you.” Many
profess to believe in such a God, but their belief rarely translates into
anything more than guilty consciences. “Guilty money is better than no money,”
is the American way, and the way of the world. But for the few genuine
believers, there is a vexing question: Can it be that anything physically possible is among the choices God has given us?
The cloned human being will present us with the same piercing questions, and
the same unavoidable choices, that any human being presents us with: Is this my
brother? Is this my sister? Is this my equal before God? Is this my equal
before the law? Am I obligated to do unto this human being as I would have done
unto myself?
The answer is always yes. And that is the answer we will be judged by, if not
by God then by history — and, most unavoidably of all, by our own souls, in
our own eyes, as we judge our own acts in the moments of death.
(to be continued)
This article appears in March 14 • 1997 and March 14 • 1997 (Cover).