Literature is not mere fiction, it provides crucial
sources of information about society. Most notably, perhaps, Upton
Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) informed the public about both the
filth of the meat industry and the miserable lives of the working class.
As clear by this example, literature offers concrete explorations into
everyday experience sociological analysis cannot. Moreover, literature
often dispenses profound warnings and anticipations of things to come.
In the words of media theorist Marshall Mcluhan, artists are the
"antennae of the future" who see and feel changes before the scientists
and philosophers.
From 18th century on, with novels like Frankenstein
(1818), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and 1984 (1949), writers have
advanced important warnings about the kind of world we may someday live
in. But perhaps the most profound literary mapping of social
transformation was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Written in 1931, it
is an excellent example of how science fiction has become, simply,
science fact, and how fast our technological world changes. Huxley's
major mistake was not in predicting what would happen, but when, failing
to appreciate that scientific and technological knowledge double every
five years. When Huxley penned Brave New World, he believed that cloning
was centuries away. In 1997, however, only 66 years after the
publication of his masterpiece, the first adult mammal cell was cloned
and the world said hello to Dolly.
In Brave New World, "Ford is Lord," because it was Henry
Ford who championed mass production, mass consumption, and the
engineering paradigm inaugurated by industrial capitalism. In Huxley's
dystopian vision, both biological and social reality are engineered:
individuals are conceived on assembly lines, customized according to
predestined classes, then cloned in huge batches. Biological
reproduction gives way to genetic replication; babies emerge not from a
womb but a petri dish, as parents are replaced by technicians. This
"brave new world," as the "savage" from the novel first imagines it, is
one of complete dehumanization. There is no love, families, marriages,
long-lasting bonds, religion, or spirituality; the only allegiance
individuals have is to Ford, the State, and the pleasure drug, Soma.
Unlike Orwell's 1984, Huxley depicts a people who are
controlled by rewards, not punishment, by non-violent manipulation, not
coercion, and by indulgence in pleasure, rather than puritan asceticism.
Huxley realizes that the most powerful form of control is when
individuals don't feel determined, when power is conflated with
pleasure, when people have nothing to resist and feel comfortable with
their alienation. Freedom does not exist in 1984 or Brave New World,
only in Brave New World no one cares. Hence, the politics of pleasure --
the frenzied pursuit of pleasure distracts individuals from the task of
citizenship and social involvement. Immersed in a society of spectacles,
where everything from TV news to education to politics is determined by
the codes of entertainment, individuals are safely marginalized, having
a nice day while the ruling elite consolidate power. Huxley is warning
us that people are sacrificing freedom for pleasure; the masses are
becoming what sociologist C. Wright Mills called "happy robots," only
the savage put it better: the hedonists of Brave New World aren't happy,
they're just numb.
With trivial qualifications, our world is Huxley's Brave
New World, shaped by a few "world controllers," artificial birth
technologies, genetic engineering, and cloning. We can't biologically
clone people yet, but it doesn't really matter because we already know
how to clone them socially, through religion, schools, mass media, and
advertising, conditioning individuals to take their stations at the
machines of production and consumption. With virtual game environments,
multisensorial spectacles like Terminator 2 at Disney World, and gadgets
such as the "intensor chair" that encloses one in a moving, simulated
world of images and sounds, we have good approximations of what Huxley
called the "feelies." From prozac and valium to xanax and librium, we
also have our own versions of Soma that make people affectless and help
them adjust to the deadening performance principle of capitalism. (As
Huxley said: "Any good intoxicant reconciles you to the world.") In the
society of the spectacle, nearly everything is culture dope. Today,
Marx's dictum would have to be revised: mass culture, not religion, is
the opiate of the people.
But, as Huxley predicted, we are now in the process of
applying the same mass production paradigm to the control of nature as
we have the organization of the economy and society. Literally, we are
engineering nature; we are designing, creating, and mass producing new
life forms by intervening at the microcosmic level. With genetic
engineering, we are embarking on the most radical experiment humankind
has ever attempted, creating entirely new species of plants and animals,
while cloning ever more animals and recklessly transgressing
well-established species boundaries.
Humankind is in the midst of a second genesis governed
by the mentalities of profit, scientific reductionism, and the
domination of nature. If current dynamics continue, soon a few biotech
corporations like Monsanto and Du Pont will own the patent rights to the
DNA of all life -- and yet there is no significant public debate, media
coverage, or legal regulation of this dangerous revolution that will
make reality as we know it obsolete.
Strolling through the new zoo of scientific surreality,
one finds a menagerie of bizarre "transgenic" species, including tobacco
plants that contain firefly genes (so they glow in the dark), fish and
tomatoes altered with antifreeze genes (so they can withstand cold
temperatures), potatoes infused with chicken genes (to get your meat and
potatoes in one dish?), chickens modified with cattle genes (to create a
larger "macro-chicken"), pigs that have human DNA (to increase their
growth rate and size), a "geep" (a cross between a goat and a sheep),
and a wide variety of genetically altered foods consumed by the public
without their knowledge.
The biotech industries assure us there are no dangers to
genetic engineering technologies, that they are not different in kind
from traditional ways of cultivating and breeding new and improved
species of plants and animals. It is true that human beings have always
manipulated the natural world with various technologies, and that they
have altered plants and animals in myriad ways, but genetic engineering
truly is unprecedented in its nature and power, Never before have we
been able to cross species boundaries, to directly mix the DNA from
different species, and to engineer biological changes as rapidly as we
are doing today. Given that we now have the technologies to steer
evolution according to human design, the key question becomes: are we
wise enough to "play God," to design new life forms and control them and
their environment, to understand the full implications of the changes is
nature we are already creating?
We need to distinguish among the different aspects of
the rapidly unfolding genetic revolution. Applied to plants, genetic
engineering is called "biotechnology" and mainly involves attempts to
design plants containing pesticide resistant genes. Used on animals,
genetic engineering is known as "pharming" and concentrates on
transforming animals into pharmaceutical factories (with medicines
secreted in their milk or blood) and creating ever larger bodies that
will reap maximal profits. Employed on human beings, genetic engineering
seeks to control and cure diseases, but it unavoidably veers into
eugenics and the portentous project of creating designer babies. In each
case, the corporate/science/technology complex decides that nature is
not good enough, does not grow fast or large enough, and accordingly
seeks a new and improved nature it can control and, in some cases
literally, milk for profit.
To be sure, there are many promises of genetic
engineering, such as improved agricultural productivity, development of
new medicines, and curing disabling diseases. But with the promises also
come frightening perils: "biopollution" as genetically altered plants
breed out of control; increases in monoculture and antibiotic resistant
bacteria; still more exploitation of animals, permanent damage to the
human genome; and a new Gattaca-like society organized around genetic
discrimination.
Given the history of how scientists and corporations
have employed technologies, the pervasive commercialization of science,
and what has already happened with the use of GE and cloning
technologies, I fear that we will see the dark side of the genetic
revolution more than the bright side. The utopias of genetic engineering
can never come to pass, because -- quite frankly -- they are rooted in
the wrong conceptual paradigm, in determinism and reductionism, whereas
nature is organized in a holistic and self-organizing mode. That is why
the new genetic creations from "Flavr-Savr tomatoes to Monsanto's Round
Up Ready corn crops to transgenic pigs -- have failed so miserably.
Sorry to bring the bad news, but the Brave New World has
arrived.
This review originally appeared in "Life Giving
Choices", the newsletter of the Vegetarian Society of El Paso (VSEP).
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