Sign Up for Our Bi-Weekly Email

Expand your perspective with thought-provoking insights, quotes, and videos hand-picked by our editors—along with the occasional update about the world of EnlightenNext.

Privacy statement

Your email address is kept confidential, and will never be published, sold or given away without your explicit consent. Thank you for joining our mailing list!

 

Against Immortality


by Andrei Codrescu
 

I am a poet not a scientist, so many of the things that matter to me are not the subject of scientific studies. Walt Whitman and Herman Melville had opposing visions of the force that gave birth to the universe. For Whitman, the universe was born in and is held together by the force of love. For Melville, “the invisible spheres were formed in fright,” in a terrifying primal darkness—a dark force that continues to dictate the evolution and workings of the universe. No matter which vision might seem more congenial to you, both of them are transcendent, posing the fundaments of a connective unity that is whole in every single aspect. Scientists, however, outside of theoretical physics, are generally unconcerned with the universe as a whole. The nature of scientific inquiry would seem to privilege human beings a priori, but beyond that, the motives and contexts of research are obscure or downright disingenuous. Not to speak of the results, which rarely resemble the original intentions.

There is no scientific experiment that does not raise ethical questions in every aspect of its unfolding, from the premise it aims to prove or disprove, from the context in which it is conducted, from the results, and from the subsequent interests that translate those results into practice. If one looks at nature as the Great Experimenter whose motives are either Whitmanic or Melvillian or neither (being self-propelled by its own, as yet unknown, logics), all other experimenters fall woefully short. The Great Experimenter, indifferent to how we interpret its intentions, acts as an organic whole; no part of it is left out. Science, as practiced by humans, began as an investigation into the deepest questions raised by nature and did not, until after the Enlightenment, lose sight of the ethical and the philosophical. In the nineteenth century, discoveries in medicine, physics, biology, astronomy, and nearly all aspects of matter led to astonishing practical results that then fed back into scientific inquiry and increased the pressure for more results. Many ethical and philosophical concerns fell by the wayside in the rush to improve control over nature. All that remains today connected to the whole of the universe is the insatiable appetite for bettering the human enterprise. Everything else in the universe is tangential or at least secondary to the human need to improve the human body and its material needs. The spiritual needs of humans in connection to the whole of the universe are not the concern of science now. It is generally assumed by scientists that those needs either do not exist or will take care of themselves in some mysterious ways that are the specialty of an imprecise class: poets, ethicists, dreamers, theologians, humanists of every stripe. This is a distinctly lesser class of people now. Culture is of interest to scientific researchers only insofar as it affects their funding and their relationship to the political class. Politics itself has abandoned, for the most part, its ancient concern for philosophy, becoming focused only on the visible benefits of science to power. And vice-versa. The political matters to science because it facilitates research.

In our democracy, competing political interests are constantly meeting the competing interests of science, adjusting themselves to one another in a tiresome game of redefinition. Ethics rarely enters the equation in this mutual game, because if it did, it would awaken a terrible anxiety in individuals—an anxiety that is already quite widespread today, despite the use of optimistic or neutral language by both scientists and politicians. The fact is that individual human beings continue to be racked by essential questions about their connections to the universe, and they will simply not put up with becoming numbers in a statistic or guinea pigs in the soothing rhetoric of science and power. Our job as humanists, as lesser members of the investigative class, is to encourage and increase the anxiety of individuals about what is done in their names.

Poetry is one of the surer ways to increase this anxiety. As I was preparing to write this article, I trusted, as I always do, in the inexplicable generosity of the left field to provide me with a few meaningful balls. Sure enough, a little poetry booklet appeared in my mail. I opened it at random and came upon this:

CRUSHERS OF THE UNIVERSE

By William Zink

10% More for Free!

Five-legged frogs are better
Than their four-legged friends.
It's always a plus to have more
Of a good thing.
Remember that when you see
One of those creatures with an extra
Appendage dangling from her shoulder,
Struggling from the water to bask
On his favorite stone.
What looks like a burden
Is really a bonus.

10% more for free
10% more for free

Maybe not a great poem, but containing enough “unscientific” delights to raise the blood pressure of a hundred scientists. Among those: irony (a truly unquantifiable and un-research-worthy force); outrage at the unending boosterism of late capitalism in its essential belief that “more is better”; and genuine sadness at our disregard for nature, still the Great Experimenter. For scientists happily playing with the genes of animals to produce aberrations on their way to some desired modification, these concerns are irrelevant. They are “sentimental,” that is to say, they come from some affective area of the brain that feels such things. The frog with five legs may not have been produced in the laboratory but has come about as nature's own mistake. Furthermore, the Great Experimenter is the author of many mistakes, and evolution is littered with them. Your scientist will see nothing wrong with duplicating mistakes on the way to a successful result. He will see no difference between his experiment and that of the Great Experimenter. Is he not part of the Ongoing Experiment himself, a pequeño dios, as the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo put it? Objectively, there is no reply to that without reference to other unscientific human responses, among which is the persistent feeling that we may be involved in some unspeakable act of hubris, that some kinds of research are contra naturam and not part of it. It is the feeling that we are conducting a parallel experiment that is at odds with the Great Experiment, that, in the end, we are a part of the Great Experiment that is about to go awfully wrong, and that, if this is indeed the case, the Great Experimenter will have no choice but to terminate humans altogether as part of the universal experiment gone wrong. Buckminster Fuller saw humans as an “information-gathering function in an eternally regenerating universe,” and if we fail in this regard, we will be unsentimentally replaced by another “information-gathering function,” maybe some kind of ants.

It's also the job of humanists, then, to see to it that this doesn't happen, that the universe might be propitiated in some way to not act like your run-of-the-mill human scientist who doesn't care how he gets to experiment or where the experiment might lead.

Among the many mysteries in the toolbox of poetry and ethics is synchronicity. This phenomenon cannot be easily bypassed by scientists, who know, just as poets do, that the left field often provides them with unexpected and inexplicable help. A book in the mail, a just-published DNA sequence, an overturned glass, a phone call from a stranger working on the same problem . . . Luther Burbank, the California botanist who created many new plants in his garden, used to say that he rarely requested any seeds or cuttings for his experiments: they just showed up in his mailbox. In fact, he ended up relying so much on his mailbox, he got angry if what he needed didn't show up, though he'd never asked anyone for it.

Scientists are not unconcerned with this force. Looking at studies of twins, Ruth Levy Guyer mentions “the Ohio twins Jim and Jim, named identically by their separate nonadoptive parents. When they were studied at age 40, each weighed 180 pounds, was six feet tall, had a dog named Toy, a child named James Allen, a wife named Betty, and an ex-wife named Linda. Each drank Miller Lite and chain-smoked. Each ground his teeth at night and regularly wrote love notes to his wife.”

How are these twins connected? Scientists fascinated by twins have measured everything measurable, from brain waves to electrical signals they may have received in the womb, but they cannot find the force that connects them.

Neither can we experimentally find the force that drives certain researchers to be fascinated by twins, without introducing a fundamental ethical question. All researchers of twins may be performing “science,” but there is a profound ethical difference between Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, who tortured and murdered Jewish twins, and researchers at, let's say, St. Thomas' Hospital in London. Is “science” really the connection between the monster Mengele and the London researchers (who are probably Tony Blair Labourites)? If that's the case, there is something seriously wrong with “science.” Mengele and other Nazis produced reams of data that later scientists were not reluctant to use until they were brought up short by ethicists. An anatomy atlas by Eduard Pernkopf, Topographiche Anatomie des Menschen, was used by physicians in Europe and the United States until the late 1980s, when some people began to question the source of the drawings. The models turned out to be victims of Nazi atrocities, and the medical illustrators were Nazi butchers. Some of those bastards considered themselves good doctors or good artists, and they doubtlessly invoked the god “science” when they were questioned. Most of them were never questioned; some of them were hanged; others died of old age under assumed identities.

It is easy, from the perspective of today, to condemn the Nazis, though it is harder to deny that their work was science. The ideology that underwrote that science was evil, but science itself was generally understood to be something pure, driven by that generous cliché still in circulation: the human thirst for knowledge, a thirst that generates the next cliché, which is that science works to improve mankind. Certainly, the researchers studying twins at the Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, established in 1992, wouldn't have it any other way. Their mission is to explore the role of genes in complex diseases, including osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. St. Thomas has the UK's largest database of twins, and it has the most detailed cohort of adult twins in the world, with hundreds of measurements for each twin. For Professor Tim Spector, director of the unit, this represents an important resource for researchers. We already have huge amounts of data on all our twins: 300 measures ranging from sense of humour to leptin levels, with the potential to gather much more. And we have a whole genome scan for 3,000 twins (1,500 pairs). It's an exciting resource for the future.

What if, in some order not yet studied in any “scientific” way, names are indeed destiny? In such an order, an interest in twins by somebody named Spector is quite significant because a twin is the “specter” of another, the shadow, as it were. The fascination with the mirror, with our own “other,” is not the subject of Dr. Spector's genetic research, but we humanists cannot do without it.



[ continue ]

 
 

Subscribe to What Is Enlightenment? magazine today and get 40% off the cover price.

Subscribe Give a gift Renew
Subscribe
 

This article is from
Our Immortality Issue

 

September–November 2005