Hollywood’s Biocon Noise Brigade

Chris Mooney has written a marvellously technoprogressive column in The American Prospect in which he exposes some of the pernicious assumptions that are endlessly reinvoked in Hollywood’s interminable retellings of the Frankenstein myth, among them both the thanklessly underwhelming Revenge of the Sith and the thankfully underperforming The Island.

I won’t rehearse the detailed case he makes, but encourage you to follow the link and give it a look for yourself.  I do want to call attention, though, to a section of his review in which his argument takes on what looks to me like a powerful wider applicability.  His account here represents an unusually clear and forceful repudiation of the bioconservative ethos in general:

I’m sick of gross caricatures of mad-scientist megalomaniacs out to accrue for themselves powers reserved only for God. I’m fed up with the insinuation (for it’s never an argument, always an insinuation) that there’s a taboo against the pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge and that certain technological achievements—especially those with the potential to affect life itself—are inherently “unnatural.” Or as Victor Frankenstein puts it in Shelley’s novel, “Learn ... by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

Just look how clear the assimilation of bioconservativism to completely conventional social conservatism Shelley’s thesis performs here is… Mooney continues:

Granted, I agree that certain lines shouldn’t be crossed. We shouldn’t, for instance, clone fully grown human beings. But not because it’s taboo; because it’s unethical. The point is, we need to use philosophical arguments, not preaching, to determine where the lines ought to be drawn.

(In case you’re wondering, I quite agree with Mooney about this given the state of medical knowledge at present.  The whole point of distinguishing “ethics” from “taboo” here, I presume, is to point out that should cloning become safe we might indeed re-assess the ethics of the procedure.  The point is to assess the human costs, risks, and benefits of science and technology, not to assess whether or not god(s) might be offended by our conduct according to whatever god(s)’s self-appointed priestly mouthpieces say at the moment on the matter while struggling to maintain their hold on worldly authority.) Anyway, he continues on: 

Moreover, I’m extremely uncomfortable with the way in which the weapon of the Frankenstein myth is repeatedly used as a club against modern-day medical researchers, who are seeking to cure people, not to become God.  The “forbidden knowledge” aspect of the myth is also troubling.  Last I checked, knowledge is a good thing, even if many kinds of knowledge can also be abused. Finally, the concept of the “unnatural” is a disturbingly arbitrary criterion to use in ruling out certain kinds of behavior or technologies. Let us not forget that interracial marriage and homosexuality have also been labeled “unnatural.”

The broader point is that simply saying “no” doesn’t qualify as wisdom, unless you’re also capable of explaining why.

To all this I simply could not agree more.  Now, go read the whole piece.  And don’t forget to scoop up his book The Republican War on Science when it arrives in September.

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Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.