On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (48 page)

One of the major concerns I have about playing with genetics is Darwin’s old concern, only magnified. Recall that Darwin believed that the only real monsters were the ones that humans had bred for ignorant aesthetic purposes. Natural selection has a tempo that weeds out unhealthy variations, whether or not they are aesthetically interesting. But artificial selection has given us bleeding diseases in Dobermans, respiration problems in bulldogs, cancer in boxers, eye lid curling in shar-peis, aorta problems in golden
retrievers, and more. Imagine a very fast tempo biotech breeding program that is motivated by human interests rather than the health interests of the animals and plants themselves. Now imagine such misguided breeding programs for every pet species.

Every gene codes for multiple traits. The same gene, turned on or off at different times, can control many diverse phenotypic traits, a phenomenon called
pleiotropy
, from a Greek phrase meaning “many influences.” The upshot is that when we think we are altering one trait with our biotech kits, we are also altering many hidden traits. A real case of such unintended genetic consequences occurred when breeders selected for a corn trait but ended up inadvertently devastating the entire strain. A gene that caused corn to lose its own tassel was selected for, but breeders did not understand that this same gene created a susceptibility to southern corn blight, and major crop destruction resulted.
²⁵

The astronomical complexity of ecological relations seems like a good reason to be extremely careful with biotech engineering. The interconnections of animals and plants are so elaborate that one wonders if we could control all the variables. Organisms have evolved symbiotically. Not only would a slight change in a predator have major consequences for the prey animals (and vice versa), but many organisms live symbiotically inside each other. Humans and cows, for example, can’t even digest many foods without intestinal and ruminant bacteria that live in their gut. Cows have bacteria, protozoa, and even fungi living in their digestive tracts, and these help them break down the cellulose in their food. A slight genetic modification in these microbes might spell disaster for the larger mammals that serve as hosts.

Perhaps these worries are only the typical Luddite anxieties, and the positive will outweigh the negative. It may well be that biotech science will be green and solve our problems of soil erosion, greenhouse gases, pandemics, food shortages, fish and forest depletions, and fuel shortages. Dyson says, “Once a new generation of children has grown up, as familiar with biotech games as our grandchildren are now with computer games, biotechnology will no longer seem weird and alien.”

Francis Fukuyama is skeptical about the social world that biotech will inevitably create. In his book
Our Posthuman Future
, he predicts that genetic engineering will be used by wealthier parents as a new form of well-intentioned eugenics. The upper class will use biotechnology to make their children smarter, healthier, and more attractive: “If wealthy parents suddenly have open to them the opportunity to increase the intelligence of their children as well as that of all their subsequent descendants, then we have the makings not just of a moral dilemma but of a full-scale class war.”
²⁶
We should not, according to Fukuyama, make a new posthuman
nature because our current one, flawed though it may be, has finally found a home in the hard-won social environment of liberal democracy. We finally have a good match between human nature and politics; the personal and the political successfully actualize each other’s potential.

Using biology to improve social and political life was tried by the Nazis, and we would do well to avoid that terrible nightmare in the future. But, according to Fukuyama, pretending there is
no
human nature or that it is infinitely malleable led to the socialist utopias of the twentieth century, wherein families, money, religion, and education were all dismantled and recreated for the greater good. Although Fukuyama distances himself from knee-jerk religious objections to biotechnology, he nonetheless seems to share the same fears about reductionism. If we think, as posthumanists do, that humans are really just composed of material causes and there is nothing sacrosanct about their current composition, we will be more likely to play God with our social reality. Such utopian perfectibility movements have had a terrible track record. Yes, biotech can give us new personalities and powers, but only by taking away others; we’ll have pharmaceutical freedom from depression, but reduced creativity. According to Fukuyama, our very souls are at stake. As moral monsters, negligent about our duties and responsibilities, we will inadvertently create biological monsters.

Historically, however, religious views about technology have not always followed the usual
Frankenstein
anxiety pattern. We are often led to believe that one is either a secular, Godless technophile or a God-fearing tech-nophobe. But many religious thinkers have interpreted technology as a tool that the Creator has given to mankind to help bring about a brighter future.
²⁷
Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, offers a contemporary version of this view when he says, “God, if it’s the God that I worship, created the universe and all the laws that regulate it, and gave us this incredible gift of an intellect. And I, like Galileo, don’t think that he gave us those abilities in order for us to forego their use. And so I think God kind of thinks that science is pretty cool!”
²⁸
From this perspective, biotechnology is God’s work. On the other side of the divide, I’ve already suggested that secular Darwinians can be very anxious and fearful (because of plieotropy and ecology, etc.) about the future uses of biotechnology. So both sides of the sacred-secular divide are more interesting than the usual caricatures.

In our “you’re not the boss of me” culture, we’re hard-pressed to pass a value judgment on the posthuman modifications that others adopt. If someone wants to make herself into a cyborg, who am I to roll my eyes? If I want
to genetically engineer my baby to have specific phenotypic qualities, who are you to prevent me?

In earlier paradigms of monsterology, all hybridization and the mixing of forms was considered insidious, and such hybrids (e.g., hermaphrodites, conjoined twins, manticores, griffins) were treated with suspicion. But after the Darwinian revolution, and especially after the New Synthesis, we came to understand that deviation, variation, mixing, and even hybridization are mechanisms of all biology; underneath the stable species forms are hidden twists and turns of micromutation. In one sense, fusion, mishmash, and hodgepodge are the techniques of evolution. Darwin’s associate John Herschel even referred to Darwin’s chance variation and natural selection as the “law of higgledy-piggledy.”

Our cultural comfort with variation and pastiche-based biology has only increased with the recent successes of biotechnology. Now we can more quickly and severely alter the bodies of animals and ourselves, just as natural genetic evolution has been doing over time. Once again, however, the postmodernists have jumped from a positive embrace of
difference
and blurred boundaries to the idea that no norms exist. How can we impose a teleological direction on our future biotech selves, our posthuman future, when all the old candidates of essentialism (e.g., God’s plan, fixed human nature) are now dead? We’re all becoming cyborg monsters after all, the postmodernists say, so we must learn to embrace and celebrate the change. The latest paradigm has reversed the ancient paradigm: now
all
hybrids,
all
variations are good.

But there is a middle way. Yes, the puritanical and essentialist tendencies that led premoderns to suspect variation should be resisted, but it doesn’t follow that every hybrid or biotech pastiche must now be affirmed. As we remake ourselves and the planet with biotechnology, we are not totally rudderless in our navigations. Biotechnology has put us in the unique position of actually composing our biological future. Our generation is like Dr. Frankenstein standing over a table of miscellaneous limbs and organs, only we’re on the table, too. We can decide what sort of hodgepodge creature will emerge. And the cultural death of God has not robbed us of rational grounds for composing a new teleology for our species.

We saw that from the time of Aristotle the monster concept has functioned as an opposing term to whatever has
purpose
. Nature, according to previous eras, has an orderly and observable developmental pattern: acorns grow into oak trees, humans give birth to humans, and generally speaking anatomical structures fit physiological functions. The fully completed or actualized state of a natural process (e.g., attaining oak tree status) was considered to be the end goal, or the purpose, or the
telos
of the process.
Monsters are the things that never fulfill their purpose or never make it to their goal, either because the development was accidentally arrested (by internal or external causes) or because matter confused or retarded the realization of form or because some moral impurity deformed the creature’s true potential. Whatever the particulars, monsters were cases of development that missed their targets.

But we now live in a Nature different from that of previous ages. Biotechnology shows us that we don’t know what the
purpose
or teleology of an animal species is (including ourselves), and we are increasingly capable of creating a new one. The old teleological goals for man—“to love God” for the theists, “to attain rational freedom” for the philosophers—were helpful in the sense that specific goals help one assess specific means. In previous eras one could assess how one was doing on the road to the natural goal, modifying one’s behavior or growth along the way. NaïVe and puerile as it sometimes was, one had a comforting map to navigate through life.

Of course we don’t
know
the purposes of nature anymore because
there are no purposes of nature
, unless one wants to include the trivial Darwinian truism that animals seek to propagate themselves. If there are no preset (a priori) goals that humans are on their way to becoming, then biotech gives us a fresh opportunity to voluntarily assign ourselves some. We may decide, for example, that the reduction of needless human suffering is worth pursuing on a global scale, and biotechnology may have a role to play as a means to that end. More specifically, married people might decide to take up Nick Bostrom’s suggestion to engineer more monogamous affection between each other by pharmaceutically increasing certain hormone production.

Moreover, the idea that we no longer have any firm foundations from which to critique some societies or individuals as monstrous is again the result of melodrama, perhaps from those who cannot overcome the despair of our posttheological paradigm. For example, it seems entirely reasonable to argue that spending all of one’s time, money, and energy on recreating one’s face and body through biotech procedures has negative consequences for the obsessed individuals and the societies they live in. To think of them as monstrous is certainly too harsh a judgment, or maybe “self-made tragic monsters” is an apt designation. I only want to suggest that there are still reasonable criteria and norms from which to make helpful value discriminations. First, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be beautiful, but there is significant empirical evidence that external modification does not actually deliver any of the inner satisfactions that such people crave. The cosmetic procedure is often a
category mistake
, a misidentification of the cause of one’s suffering (though I hasten to add that extreme mutilations from disease or wounds suffered in military service are indeed debilitating,
and the quality of life for those afflicted is much improved by external modifications). Second, despite all the perfectionist rhetoric of the trans-humanists, trying to actually stop and reverse aging is still akin to trying to square a circle. Flesh is inherently impermanent, and trying to make it permanent remains in the realm of pipe dreams. Third, given the fact that human beings have great creative potential in the fine arts, in social diplomacy, in philanthropy, in scholarly pursuits, in craftsmanship, and in the sciences, it’s a sad fact that spending one’s energy capital on rhinoplasty actually
prevents
the actualization of so much other great potential. In the same way that a life of television watching essentially prevents a young child from doing so many other wonderful things, so, too, the life of cosmetic attention is like a slow leak in the faucet of human potential. And what is said here about the individual is only magnified when we consider the larger
societies
of cosmetic obsession. Obviously, there are much more extreme abuses of biotechnology, such as governments developing biological germ warfare, but those only demonstrate more effortlessly that our powers of normative judgment are entirely intact after the death of traditional teleology.

As we chart new teleologies with biotechnology, two things seem crucial. First, choices for such directions must be the result of democratic process, not autocratic statecraft. Politicians should not impose the norms of the future; we’ve already seen what kind of monsters that sort of project produces. Second, I would argue that a major source of data for setting our future direction has to be biology. The idea that human norms and
values
have nothing to do with the biological
facts
of our existence is an idea that has foundered and played itself out. Learning more about our emotional, physiological, and cognitive powers, limitations, and tendencies will help us chart a clear-eyed biotech course, one that steers between the Scylla of denial and Luddite avoidance and the Charybdis of gung-ho abandon.

Whatever form this new era of nonteleological nature takes, we can be sure that the concept of monster does not lose its semantic power by extension to everything. Previous eras saw monsters as oppositions to an otherwise teleological nature; now that we’ve rejected such an idea of nature, the postmoderns are cheerfully folding us all under the monster umbrella and celebrating the end of rational discrimination itself. But
monster
is as useful in ordinary language as it’s ever been. Moreover, the family resemblance of
monster meanings
has had significant integrity over the ages. It may not have the connotations of abject failure that it previously held, because teleology is not what it was, but it is still used to define the relatively
unhealthy
aspects of our social, psychological, cultural, and biological environments. The term and the concept of monster are still very useful.