The ego and the fear of death.
{Photo credit: quotespictures.net}
By Nirvanee.
The age-old strife of humankind to overcome mortality, and the equally ambitious desire to control gender ratio and quality of population, got a 21st century boost as genetic technology blasted into the Space Age.
The topics of DNA screening and human bioengineering are the two seemingly unrelated areas of modern genetics. The former is concerned with the analysis of individual DNA for the purpose of determining predispositions for certain diseases; the latter explores the very current and acute issue of genetically manipulated embryos. Social debate over ethics, pros and cons of DNA screening, gender selection, god-panels with religious leaders in them, legal issues, legislative options, short-term and long-term effects, and technical details, have long been raging, and are complex enough to make it difficult to see how the topics are related. However, looking into the roots of these subjects, the connection and its relevance becomes obvious.
Our fear of death propelled the development of modern medical knowledge, which now enables us to learn our genetic predispositions and also urges us to utilize radical measures, like mutilating our own bodies (undergoing mastectomy to avoid potential breast cancer) and exposing ourselves and our children to extreme pain and harm (vaccination, chemotherapy, etc.) to extend our earthly lives by a fraction of what it would be without all that, even when we know our bodies’ demise is inevitable. Is this controversial concept normal? Is it natural? Is it ethical? What is ethics anyway?
To understand why this fear of death is such a strong and ‘persuasive’ instinct, we have to explore the driving force behind it. Brendan I. Koerner, in his article ‘Embryo Police‘, tells us about a family who decided that they must have something — in this case, not a trendier car, a bigger house, or a fancier breed of a dog, but — a daughter! Not just a child, definitely not another boy, not even necessarily the continuation of their family genes, but specifically and exclusively a girl who would replace their tragically deceased daughter.
Do we really have to be this specific? Why cannot we accept and be content with what nature deals us? Why do we have to have? Marketing and advertisement gurus have figured it out long ago and built a multibillion dollar industry around it. It is called ‘ego’.
In a world where we so readily accept the notion that nothing can be created and nothing can perish, we still think that we can create life, and when our body perishes (that is to say transforms), the one most significant element of our existence — consciousness — perishes with it. This idea is unacceptable for the ego; therefore, we developed a modern belief system where our limited earthly life determines our thoughts, actions, and desires. Consequently, we want everything right now, immediately, and the way we want it. Is our ego right when it tells us that it is okay to interfere with nature’s order, and that we have the right (talk about ethics) to determine who will be born and who will not?
‘Ethics’, according to Webster’s dictionary, is ‘the discipline dealing with what is good and bad’. Great. But what is good? Since Mr. Webster fails us on that one by providing strictly linguistic answers, we have to keep looking until Mr. Shakespeare comes to our rescue: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Well, all it did was open up another question: Whose thinking? Apparently, in the UK, it is a panel called HFEA. This is a citizens’ panel, assigned the task of taking a stand on controversies of modern genetic issues. It seems like a good idea since the panel consists of lay people without affiliations to the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry. But can we trust the integrity of a panel that claims: “We also look for people who do not have any sort of emotional baggage,” and then turns around and recruits a clergyman — with an obvious and openly advertised agenda on the topic — to its ranks? It appears that the ‘slippery slope’ of the questions of ethics that the members of HFEA are so concerned about is the very existence of the HFEA.
In legal and corporate America, the dilemma seems to be absent, since the question was answered long ago: greed is good, profit is even better.
However (or should I say fittingly?), America also gave birth to the Scientology movement, which defines ‘good’ as ‘anything that promotes the survival of life at the highest level’. Well, humans have survived; what is more, they became the dominant species of Earth long before the idea of profit emerged. So maybe if we let nature take its course, it could manage without HFEA, or corporate profit-driven genetic interferences, as it did for about 4.5 billion years.
And that brings me back to my point. Our success as a species created a very useful — and at the same time, dangerous — part of our psyche: our ego. While it was one of the necessary elements for our quick propagation in the world, at this point it appears to be in the way of our further development and success. The ego is against death, which made our physical survival possible, and now we got to a point when this strong clinging on to our physical form is still there, but we have acquired a level of knowledge which gives us ‘god-like powers’ and begins to reach past the boundaries of earthly life.
Are we holding enough knowledge to utilize these powers without any concerns about their consequences? Are we prepared and ready to act as gods, as masters of birth and death?
Koerner contemplates that a fetus which is aborted for its gender or other reasons could have been the next Beethoven, or just a person leading a happy and productive life. This is, of course, all speculation, but the story of Carly Fleischmann, a 14-year-old autistic girl featured in the ’60 Minutes’ documentary series, is real and shocking. She was written off as mentally deficient, not even able to talk, until she learned how to type on a computer and exposed her extreme intelligence. She is not a ‘could have been’, she is; although using early detection methods, she could have been aborted as an unwanted and useless child.
Reading about the fetuses aborted because of their gender, one cannot help but think about the horrific scenes of Evan Grae Davis’ shocking documentary ‘It’s A Girl!‘, that tells the story of 200 million (that is 2/3 of the entire US population!) missing girls in third world countries, or the very logical reasoning of Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva’s ‘After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?‘ published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, that contemplates how killing a baby after birth should also be legal for the same reasons as those for which an abortion could have been legally administered. While Giubilini and Minerva’s article smells like a double-spin provocation based on pro-choice agendas, the logic of it is hard to argue, and shakes the very foundation of our so-called ‘ethics’.
To summarize, current laws allegedly based on our ethics tell us that it is ethical to terminate lives in the womb, but according to HFEA, it is unethical to manipulate the gender of a fetus, and according to doctors of philosophy Giuiblini and Minerva, it should be ethical to kill babies.
What does it have to do with the fear of death? While on the one hand, our fear of our own mortality prompts many of us to get our DNA profiles mapped, in order to be able to take action and push out the expiration date of our carrying vessels, aka bodies, on the other one, we deal death to those we consider unwanted.
There is yet another aspect of interfering with nature’s order — the long-term effects. Unprepared for those, we were not reluctant to unleash atomic explosions on hundreds of thousands innocent people to create indirect effects that have been lingering on for over seventy years now, to develop monocrop agriculture that has created the Dust Bowls of the thirties, waging starvation on hundreds of thousands in the US, to use chemicals like DDT, to find out later the horrible birth defects it caused in newborns, or most recently to shove cancer, and DNA-defect-causing GMOs down people’s throats under the all-justifying flag of corporate profits, not caring about the 17,368 suicides by farmers in India in 2009 alone (Gucciardi) that could be directly linked to the aggressive marketing and legal actions of Monsanto and its peers in order to propagate their genetically modified cotton and corn seeds. All these and many other examples are sending .a clear message, yet it is one which we still do not seem to understand: it is proven to be an extremely arrogant and dumb idea to think that less than a hundred years of research and experimentation can provide us with sufficient knowledge to alter things that nature worked out in 4.5 billion years, without endangering our and other species’ existence just because we seem to be unable to accept our own mortality or our lives the way they would unfold in a natural flow of events.
In the words of Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate biophysicist from the 1930s: “Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.”
While I am giving in to the confusion that my research induced in my feeble mind, ready to accept that the goal that I have set (to understand the role and meaning of ethics) was not accomplished, I cannot help but think that as much as history is written by the winners, ethics is written by the living along the lines that are very difficult to follow and seem to be lacking consistency or logic.
I believe this is a good time to read a little history and try to learn something from mistakes we have made in the past, instead of making new ones. A good time for medical researchers and practitioners to take a good look at their Hippocratic Oath and heed it by “not doing harm”, not even in the name of the almighty profit or blissful ignorance. A good time to rethink our attitude towards life and death as a natural and normal part of life. A good time to give up our egos and learn that “it’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got”. Then, maybe, we will gain some moral ground, some new understanding, and the right to begin to think about our ‘new ethics’.
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Nirvanee always had difficulty and aversion to define himself. He’d rather expresses his true self through typographed feelings and verbal images. He strongly believes that perception is superior to projection in importance and realness, therefore everything is defined by the observer, not the creator. Born right-brainer, with expansive training in using the left, gender, status, and occupation are labels that distract him from his true essence (which is yet to be found), therefore irrelevant. What is relevant is whether his work can add to this world, and that is to be defined by the reader and not the author. For him, creation is for the joy of it and for the joy of others. Personal credit does not matter. You can connect with him on Facebook.
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{Tame your ego}
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