Rant Number 560 28 October 2013
Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel, Frankenstein or the New Prometheus, tells of an idealistic scientist who seeks to create a perfect, beautiful and all-good creature. Alas, he engenders the opposite: an ugly and malignant monster, intent on destroying his own creator. Makes your flesh creep, doesn’t it? Only a fantasy, thank God.
But is it? The creature may be back. Not in fiction, this time in reality. Technologically enhanced. Maybe you can produce him in your own garage. Thanks to a wondrous, vertiginous development: 3D printing.
It is not science fiction. It is science fact. Pop into London’s Science Museum. Inspect the ‘3D: printing the future’ exhibition and be at once stunned, amazed and bewitched. There is a wall with 600 3D-printed objects. From a mechanical hand to a bicycle. But that’s chicken-feed. Imagine soon making your own drones (taking sweet revenge on the noisy sods down the road, eh?), mobile phones, guns und so weiter. But the most thrilling and more peaceful possibilities are in medicine. The World Today mag suggests applications to digital biology. Presently you could 3D print ‘living cells that will form complex multicellular organisms.’ Avatar of Frankenstein’s creature?
‘A new world of consumer choice’, a Roger Highfield thought-provoking article puts it. How true. Today you are primarily a ‘consumer’. Some sell, some buy but still all consumers. And consumers are constantly hungry for consumption. A hunger ever increased by relentless advertising. ‘How many things I do not need!’ a wise man uttered when visiting a shopping mall. 99% of the people mocked him: ‘Idiot! How many glittering things do I need! I must have them!’ And so...the sky is the limit. Terrorists, revolutionaries and gangsters will 3D- print their weapons. Nuclear, chemical, bacteriological...why not? Handguns are pre-history. Technology can do better than that. Your own Hiroshima, your own Dresden, home-made holocausts, voila’!
3D-print a living being. Forget Frankenstein, romantic old hat. Create your own truly gorgeous creature, maybe a Luroa - the name of a murderous hooker in a Jack Williamson’s novel. Wait a minute: why ‘gorgeous’? See, some people do like monsters. Ancient Rome had something called the monster market. Where people brought for sale unfortunate freaks, people born with human abnormalities, such as two heads or tentacles instead of arms. You know what? They found buyers aplenty. Freaks attract, you see?
In The Question concerning Technology philosopher Martin Heidegger tackles the matter. In language maddeningly dense and convoluted – he is German, no? Still, he speaks of this applied science as a human-created instrumentality. As a means to an end, that is. Modern technology however threatens to become its own end. So that it turns human beings, its creators, into means, as unfree beings. Men thus get chained to technology. Instrumentality rules. Look about you as you travel, work, drive, walk down the street or watch TV. How many people are wearing earphones, how many are listening or jabbering into their mobiles? But how many could actually play music? A musical instrument? Do they need to be constantly ‘in touch’? Who rules? Who is really in charge? The person or the gadgets?
Heidegger is no reactionary Luddite. He does not claim technology is satanic, like William Blake’s mills. Nor does he preach breaking machines, the forerunners of 3D-printers. Rather, technology is a challenge. A challenge to its creators. Also a challenge to nature. Nature is ‘set upon’ by technology, like a tranquil English landscape disfigured, set upon by ungainly wind farms. And human nature is so set upon, too. The triumph of technology corresponds with the downfall of man. The human being, ‘the shepherd of Being’, in Heidegger’s tantalisingly obscure formulation, becomes technology’s sheep – or perhaps the toy of some arcane, enigmatic manipulators, who knows?
Do you dig the regular reference to workers, people as ‘human resources’? Once upon a time Fr Frank was a lad. As a dogsbody in an oil company, he worked in the Personnel Department. Interesting name because the root meaning of ‘personnel’ is ‘person’. An individual human being. That department has now gone. It has been supplanted by ‘Human Resources’. Significant change because technology and the market like less human persons than human resources. The technocrats perceive human beings chiefly as resources. As mere means to useful ends. (As Kant taught, human beings can never be treated exclusively as means but only as ends in themselves.) As objects to be manipulated, used, exploited and, more and more, it seems, discarded like old socks.
Technology cannot be stopped or disinvented, even if it was desirable, which is not. Mobile phones and similar gadgets when functionally used are helpful. Nor does applied science necessarily produce monsters. Frankenstein’s return can be prevented. The question is how to tame, regulate and control technological progress. The liberal-democratic state, basically an adjunct or instrument of the capitalist free market, is at best unwilling or unable to do so, at worst complicit. Only an ethical state can subjugate technology to serve truly human, liberating ends. And such an ethical state is certainly not one which sees its citizens mainly as consumers but as citizens. It is a state in which the economic factor is subordinate to the political. The crux of the matter lies in politics. Again, etymology suggests that the essence of what the Greeks called the polis, the natural human community, common social life, is politics. Until the political question is settled, the technological issue won’t be.
In the classic horror movie Frankenstein the crude experiment goes wrong because the hideous, misshapen creature, memorably played by Boris Karloff, is mistakenly given a criminal’s brain. Technology of course does not think but thinking, genuine human, political and moral thinking is what the scope and uses of technology cry out for. That is so because humanity’s impious rulers, like the arrogant Titan Prometheus, are hell-bent on setting their dominion over an earth which is not of their own creation.
Remember, therefore, the fate of Prometheus...
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