Engineering the Brave New World: Reality
Ain't What It Used To Be
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.
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