Troubling Thought for a Progressive
Tuesday morning, NPR ran a creepily light-hearted feature on bioengineering students cloning new strains (that is, essentially, new species or at least sub-species) of E.Coli. In particular, they were adding new genes to change the odor. The students’ cavalier attitude—“what fun! Now they smell like banana!”—expressed itself in the end (and I quote) as, “we’re just making stuff,” emphasis firmly on “stuff.”
At that point, I realized that while I shuffle through ancient arguments about intangibles like God, these folks are out there literally redefining—reinventing—life itself, becoming agents of evolution and assuring that evolution will now serve (or try to serve) human whims.
But in the long run it may fail to serve human interests.
The consequence of this school-child tampering?
A loss of “life”. Once we marveled at and called it miraculous. Something even the most knowledgeable alchemist could not bestow upon a rock, no matter how humanly shaped. Life the “Chi,” the anima, the spirit. Life is now, simply, “stuff.” We can no longer distinguish its value or miracle from that of base metal.
So as science fiction has warned us since the early 1800s, we’re playing with dangerous fires. But where the nineteenth century read Mary Shelley’s dream of an ill-treated patchwork man, we draw our stories from the morning news. Truly, we are not far from the cyborgs and androids, the odd performing hybrid “toy” creatures of Blade Runner. Nor, it seems, from the callous disregard that characterizes the corporate engineers of those fictional societies in whose radically materialist eyes humans, too, are merely cogs, functioning or not, in the system. Harrison Ford barely has a better life than his condemned, blond paramour. When he fails to perform for the state, a price falls on his head as well. Life, it’s just “stuff” after all.
Apparently we pay no heed to the moral warnings embedded in those tales.
Tragically, the young people performing these Frankensteinian pyrotechnics were completely unaware of their power or any consequences other than, it seems, sweeter smelling excrement. (We already have women buying pills that virtually eliminate their gendered rhythms. Imagine the thrill of purchasing a kit that will forever eliminate your need for bottled bathroom fragrance.)
Someone has to stand up for the sacred spark in life—for freedom as a value and a right that undergirds all progress. As elusive and indefinite as God, it is sacred both to God and to evolution. Without freedom to mutate as they will, living organisms will be more than ever in thrall to the dangerous humans. And like any monopolistic autocracy, the human empire will visit havoc on the order of the universe–or at least the little corner of it we call the earth.
This is a moment to rethink all assumptions. Some will conclude that those intangible, comprehensive categories—life, for instance—never had any more absolute value than the concept of God or transcendance. They will point to better smelling e.coli—potentially better smelling excrement—as a wonderful commodity. Never mind that foul smells inform us—warn us, often, of poisons and danger. Within that new world order human value will be challenged by its own . Our value may plummet with the value of the “stuff” we are made on. And the seemingly innocent pleasures we derive may trigger destructive consequences as the universe—all that other “stuff”— seeks equilibrium.
“Free the E. Coli” seems an absurdist mantra, but I’m thinking of printing it on a t-shirt.
