NEGOTIATION IS OVER! declaring war on abusers and oppressors!

Simulposted with Thomas Paine’s Corner

by Dr. Steve Best

Like many vivisectors who currently ply their ruthless ‘craft’ in the ‘pursuit of knowledge,’ including J. David Jentsch of UCLA, Dr. Robert White epitomized the “Frankenstein Syndrome.” In spring of 1977, he grafted one monkey’s head onto another’s body and showed a film of this “experiment” on Italian television.

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the first and most prescient critiques of modern science and technology out of control, creating unanticipated destructive consequences. The novel has been reprinted endless times, made into countless films, and continues to shape our fears and suspicions of science and technology. It has spawned a vast literature, as well as genres of popular culture which have warned, time and time again, that the power of modern science and technology — if divorced from an ethical sensibility and insight into the contingency and unpredictability of complex systems — may bring disastrous results to human beings, other life forms, and the earth as a whole.

Frankenstein first appeared in 1818 at the dawn of the industrial revolution, as a critical response to the insurgence of technological modernity. Emerging about the same time as the Luddite’s demolition of the factory machines that threatened their livelihood, Shelley’s novel shared the anti-technological vision found in Blake and the Romantics. Drawing on the Gothic tradition of tales of horror, Frankenstein anticipates the genre of science fiction writing, a mode that extrapolates a “what if?” situation, showing the possible consequences of rapid scientific and technological innovation. In Shelley’s case, the premise was: what if human beings could originate life by reanimating the dead and forming a new being out of human flesh and organs? The result, of course, is Victor Frankenstein’s “monster” who disgusts the scientist, escapes from his basement, and goes on a rampage, becoming a murderous and dangerous “fiend” after repeated mistreatment by humans and learning of his abandonment by his creator.

Shelley’s tale synthesizes the vision of scientific materialism that modern science can produce wonders, including new life forms, and the stance of Gothic romanticism, that fears the ugly, the monstrous, the irrational, and the violent erupting and destroying human hopes and life. Her style revels in evocations of the sublime, especially in the treatment of nature, but also the demonic romance of science, in which the modern scientist plays the role of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, delving into the mysteries of nature to seek answers and to create new forms of life. Told in the form of a series of diary entries in which an intrepid explorer Francis Walton narrates his encounter with Victor Frankenstein who he picked up at sea en route to the North Pole, the novel presents multiple perspectives on the events of the tale, as seen by Victor, Walton, and the creature.

An Enlightenment Faust, Victor Frankenstein represents both the drive to master the mysteries of life and the Cartesian ego separated from the body, other people, nature, and the social world. Taught by his father the principles of modern science, Victor renounces alchemy, mysticism, and tradition, and seeks truth through scientific method, just as modern science itself was eradicating the premodern influences from its emerging mechanistic models. Above all, Dr. Frankenstein — the “modern Prometheus” as the book is subtitled — stole fire from the Gods, the secret of the creation of life, and aspired to become like a god, the author of life and a new species. He is thus a distinctly modern hero who embodies the deepest impulses of modernity to control nature, perfect social existence, and produce new forms of life. But in his pursuit of the life-force, he isolates himself from other people, including his family, fiancé Elizabeth, and friends, all of whom are destroyed by his obsession. Like Descartes, Victor sees the search for truth as an individual quest and like Bacon defines knowledge as an instrument for subduing nature and controlling its forces.

Much more than merely a romantic yarn or dark Gothic adventure tale, Frankenstein raises ethical questions concerning scientific inquiry and the nature and use of technology. Shelley’s allegory represents Dr. Frankenstein as committing a number of wrongs: he turned his back on his “hideous” creation, he allowed it to escape from his home to roam freely in society, he permitted a servant to be condemned and put to death for crimes he knew his progeny committed, and thus acted irresponsibly throughout. Scientifically brilliant, but emotionally and ethically crippled, Dr. Frankenstein proved himself to be the real monster, confirming Ashley Montague’s insight that “an intelligence that is not humane is the most dangerous thing in the world,” as well as Kant’s emphasis that knowledge divorced from the “good will” is a vice not a virtue.

Shelley’s themes of technology producing calamities and eluding human control implies that technology — along with the social and natural environments in which it is constituted — is a complex system that does not lend itself to deterministic schemes of predictability. Shelley posed a warning that raised, before the currently available nuclear and genetic technologies, a crucial question facing us today: Should human beings attempt to control, alter, improve, or, most extremely, beget life through technological means? Humanity may certainly improve its world through technology, Shelley suggests, but there should be limits to technological intervention in nature. Shelley draws the line at the human creation of life; human beings must not “play God,” her novel suggests, or, in their overweening hubris and lack of wisdom, they will suffer the catastrophic consequences that inevitably will result.

Currently, a crucial debate is unfolding over what, if any, limits exist that could impede human efforts to transform nature. Yet Frankenstein should not be read as an attack on science per se, but rather as a dissection of the hubris of an ethically irresponsible and inhumane science obsessed with control and manipulation. Hence, the tragedy of Frankenstein is not that he creates a form of life that careens out of control, but that he refuses to take ethical responsibility for his creation, turns his back on it, and refuses to provide adequate controls, safeguards, and monitoring for his experiment.

Shelley thus anticipated the immanent arrival of an era when science acquires the powers to create life, and her monster represents the dangers this project carries, as a new species can easily escape human control and wreak havoc on its creators and environment. Shelley’s fable also suggests that human creations might themselves breed and produce a new, even more intractable species, as suggested in the subplot of the mutant seeking a wife and family. Hence, Shelley previews key aspects of the fifth discontinuity, where the creation of a new species threatens to rebound against humanity, and to decenter the human, robbing it of its prerogatives, uniqueness, and claims to the pinnacle of evolution. Indeed, the “monster” is appalled as he learns about the sordid history of human violence, power, bigotry, and bloodshed, leading him to question the supposed superiority and wisdom of Homo sapiens.

Moreover, Frankenstein deconstructs the line between the natural and artificial, persons and things, the born and the made, and presents the sensitive creature as a physically and mentally superior being. A sort of Rousseauean “natural man,” the creature is innocent of human ways and only becomes violent when shunned and mistreated. Open to experience and learning, the creature shapes his mind and behavior through the reading of books, which gives him a sense of the range of human possibilities and existence of both good and evil, benevolence and violence. At different times in the novel, Frankenstein’s creation is portrayed as a thing, as nonhuman, while other times its exquisitely human features come to the fore. Victor sees his progeny both ways and the perception of the creature as a “monster” points precisely to the transcendence and undercutting of natural boundaries, its mixing human and non-human, person and thing, in frightening and disturbing ways.

Frankenstein’s creature also shows how an inhumane society refuses to recognize difference and otherness and brutally mistreats those who appear disparate and less than fully human. Film audiences through the ages have sympathized with Boris Karloff’s poignant portrayal of the creature in James Whales’ 1931 classic film by recognizing that he merely wants acceptance, understanding, respect, and contact with his own kind. An anticipatory symbol of postmodern otherness, the Frankenstein figure thus reproaches a modernity that normalizes and homogenizes, while marginalizing or destroying those who do not fit into its established order.

In today’s postmodern adventure, the boundaries between science fiction and science fact are fast collapsing. To paraphrase Baudrillard’s 1988 remark about the year 2000, Frankenstein is already here. Genetic engineering, bionics, lab-grown organs, xenotransplanation, organ markets, hand and forearm transplants, and full body transplants (experiments grafting the head of one monkey onto the body of another), all signal the materialization of Shelley’s vision. Technologically designed species can be owned, patented, and commodified by corporations, while animals such as frogs, sheep, mice, and bulls have been cloned. Some scientists like Richard Seed are actively working to clone human beings, while others imagine concocting chimeras that are half-human, half-ape for medical and experimental purposes. Through contemporary science and technology, human beings are thus taking decisive steps toward becoming chimeras, mutants, and cyborgs. They are no longer species “originals,” but rather syntheses of flesh, DNA, blood and organs from other species, silicon chips, technological implants, and prosthetics. Thus, “human beings” today can easily be part human, part animal, and part machine.

With computers and new technologies becoming increasingly sophisticated, ubiquitous, and central to the accumulation of capital, it is not surprising that the human imagination articulates a fear of technological takeover. Hence, there has been a proliferation of visions of technology rebelling against human creators, such as in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the computer HAL refuses to follow human orders and kills a crew member. The film Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971) shows Russian and American supercomputers merging to take political control of earth. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1980), engineer Paul Proteus struggles to survive in a world dominated by machines. Isaac Asimov’s short story “Little Lost Robot” (1947) depicts human beings destroying robots that develop intelligence and will. Android (1982) features the plight of “Max,” an android living on a space station who learns he is about to be replaced by a better prototype, but kills his designer to fulfill his dream of living on earth. Demon Seed (1976) portrays a supercomputer that manages a house and then goes array, raping its female occupant. In Blade Runner (1982), androids return to earth in a quest for longer lives and freedom from human slavery. The Terminator series portrays a Skynet computer system acquiring self-consciousness and seeking to destroy human beings, first through nuclear warfare, and then by sending cyborgs back in time to destroy the seeds of future human resistance. William Gibson’s cyberpunk trilogy presents forms of artificial intelligence who use human beings to accomplish their ends. The Matrix (1999) conjures up a grisly post-holocaust world where humans are appropriated as energy sources for computers, while their minds inhabit a cyberworld they take for reality.

Throughout the modern literature on human inventions — whether robots, androids, cyborgs, a Frankenstein being made out of flesh and human parts, or computers like HAL and Skynet — one finds the same anxiety and ambiguity: Are these creations friend or foe? Servants or master? Can we subordinate them to human will and purpose, or will they acquire a will and purpose of their own, and fight against us? Are they smarter or better than us? In modern and contemporary culture, we find a constant fear that machines and technological creations will breed out of control and take over — e.g., Dr. Frankenstein’s creation wants a wife, Asimov’s robots acquire self-consciousness and an independent will, the dinosaurs at Jurassic Park spontaneously reproduce, the genetically engineered sharks of Deep Blue Sea kill human beings to attain their freedom, and the computer systems in the Terminator and The Matrix seek to eradicate superfluous humanity. Thus, sensing the growing technoscientific manipulation of life, the ascendancy of humans to a life-creating “God,” media culture increasingly dramatizes the perils of the fifth discontinuity.

In retrospect, there is little Shelley imagined in her worst nightmares that has not already become reality in some sense; indeed, given the history of atomic and biochemical weapons, her anticipations were not dark and foreboding enough. There is a significant difference, for example, between unleashing a being that kills a few people before destroying itself, and dropping a nuclear weapon that obliterates entire cities, as the U.S. leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 — or, for that matter, unleashing a virus that wipes out entire peoples and species.

But of course Shelley’s vision concerned more than just the delusions of one mad scientist, it involved the Frankenstein syndrome — the obsession with control over natural processes, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, divorced from a careful consideration of ethics, politics, and potential consequences. Thus Frankenstein’s “monster” remains an enduring symbol for any potent technology that human beings create which escapes their control and threatens their survival. Nowhere do the symbols and syndrome of Frankenstein apply more readily today than in the case of nanotechnologies, stem cell research, germ-line engineering (which makes permanent alterations in a genetic code), and cloning, all involving the manipulation of microcosmic natural forces. Having dispelled the mystery of the atom, scientists are now unlocking the secrets of the gene, and a dizzying array of benedictions and curses await us.

The lesson of Frankenstein highlights the need to carefully reflect upon the consequences of new technologies, to closely monitor their effects, and to accept accountability for scientific and technological undertakings. However, there are many scientists and engineers today who embrace unlimited technological innovation without ethical accountability. Devouring the tree of knowledge, accepting no legitimate boundaries of human intervention in nature, championing computers, robotics, artificial intelligence, cloning, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering, drunk with the potion of “progress,” they would find Shelley’s vision to be atavistic and “romantic” in the worst sense of the term. While we would reject blanket prohibitions against human intervention in nature, we support a critical and skeptical attitude toward new developments in science and technology.

Undoubtedly, we need a dialectical analysis of science and technology that steers between the Scylla and Charybdis of technophobia and technophilia, one able to gauge the whitewaters of rapidly changing developments of the postmodern adventure. Yet the modernist belief in the technofix, the credulous, religious-like fervor that technology can solve all our problems is a dangerous illusion that must be abandoned. Technologies often generate more problems than they “solve,” as they help constitute a fast-paced, super-stressed, overworked, and overpopulated society that is drowning in its own toxic waste, threatening the ecology of the earth, and changing the very nature of human existence – not necessarily for the better. Consequently, a postmodern philosophy of technology will at once maintain critical and skeptical positions, reject essentialist, determinist, and fixed definition of “human nature,” and embrace life-enhancing scientific and technological innovations carried through with ethical responsibility.

Dr. Steven Best is NIO’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation.  Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Dr. Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.

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