Dignity and Reduction

In Finding Neverland (2004), there's great little scene where Johnny Depp's character, P.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, is performing for some children in a park. He pretends to be a fearless bear trainer, and his furry friend, Porthos, plays the part of the bear. But before he begins, Peter, the young realist, played by Freddie Highmore, says "But this is absurd. It's just a dog." Depp responds,

Just a dog? Just? Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he's just a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That's like saying, "He can't climb that mountain, he's just a man," or "That's not a diamond, it's just a rock." Just.

This scene stuck with me the first time I watched the film, and it came readily to mind as I began writing this post. A family friend sent me this article from the Wall Street Journal several weeks back, asking what I thought. I promised him a blog post, but due to finals and travel, I'm just getting around to it. The article is an interview with bioethicist Leon Kass about the recent trial of Kermit Gosnell, the head of an abortion clinic in Pennsylvania who was convicted for murder in three illegally performed, late-term abortions. Kass's approach to bioethics focuses on the notion of human dignity and on how the feeling of repugnance can be a sign that somebody's dignity has been violated. He worries that modern science is encroaching on that which makes us human:

"Pursuing perfect babies, ageless bodies and happy souls with the aid of cloning, genetic engineering and psychopharmacology," he thinks, are among the most significant of those threats [to our dignity].
"Killing the creature made in God's image is an old story," he says. "I deplore it. But the new threat is the ability to transform that creature into images of our own choosing, without regard to whether the new creature is going to be an improvement, or whether these so-called improvements are going to sap all of the energies of the soul that make for human aspirations, art, science and care for the less fortunate. All of these things have wellsprings in the human soul, and they are at risk in efforts to redesign us and move us to the posthuman future."

But the problem isn't science itself, he tells us, its "scientism", which he defines as

a quasi-religious faith that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name; that scientific knowledge gives you an exhaustive account of the way things are; and that science will transcend all the limitations of our human condition, all of our miseries...
That such an outlook is both blinkered and dangerous, Dr. Kass thinks, should be obvious to anyone who has ever been in love or felt other great emotions. "There's no doubt that the human experience of love," he says, is mirrored by "events that are measurable in the brain. But anybody who has ever fallen in love knows that love is not just an elevated level of some peptide in the hypothalamus.

There is a lot at play here, but I what I want to focus on is this last bit. We Western Moderns have a tendency to bury the most important truths deep in the ineffable. We feel that by explaining something, we have taken all the mystery out of it. In Dripping Springs, TX, where I came of age, many of my peers didn't accept the theory of evolution for precisely this reason. Especially when it comes to the origins of life itself, explanations which use blind, natural laws and brute chance take away the magic of whence we come and what we are. According to evolutionary biology, we are all just a ball of cells and chemical reactions.

Ah, here we are again. Just. In the article, Kass says that the experience of love is "mirrored" by measurable events in the brain. In other words, love is not contained in those measurable events. The chemical reactions, firing neurons, and hormones aren't love itself, merely the reflections of love. True love is inexpressible, incapable of being completely explained, and can only be known by experiencing it yourself. How do you know when you love somebody or when you've found "the one"? Answer: you just know.

But I've grown to disagree with this for a couple of reasons. (If you haven't been reading along, my posts on Science vs. Religion and Freedom offer some of the background to my thought.) First, experiences which are, at their most fundamental level, incapable of being fully contained in a concept are a dime a dozen. "Love", or "rapture", or "sublimity" are all failures of expression in the exact same way that "blue" is. The color blue corresponds to a certain wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, but the perception of blueness is incommunicable. This isn't something special about certain concepts, it's a fundamental aspect of language. We learn which experience is commonly associated with the word blue. Knowing the range of wavelengths which we call blue changes nothing about our experience of it or how beautiful we find certain instances of it. I think the same thing can be said for "love" or any other concept. Just because we can't communicate an experience directly, or measure it directly, does not mean that something more must be going on.

Second, if, for the sake of argument, somebody discovered the equation for love, and if somebody then invented a machine which could induce the exact experience of love into our brain, if all of the joy, pain, hunger, longing, urges, and crazy perfection of love could be replicated with the push of a button, how would my experience of love and what it means to me change? In other words, what if love really was just a chemical reaction, just a "an elevated level of some peptide in the hypothalamus" and nothing more? Would that really change anything? Not in the slightest. How could it?

All of this strikes me as another version of the God-of-the-gaps. If we hide our truths, our meanings of life, in the places where science can't touch them, what happens when science does anyway? This isn't scientism; I have no illusion about the limits of what science can actually say about the world (again, see my previous science and religion post for more). But to me, the more miraculous situation is the one in which I am just a bag of cells, and yet my humanity emerges unscathed; love can be just a chemical reaction and still be the highest experience on earth; we can each have a dignity without founding it on a soul, spirit, or any other ineffable quality. After all, in a modern democracy, we must have a way of doing this.

The children playing in the park should keep their imagination, their dancing bears, and we grumpy realists should stay out of their games. But the real world needs us to open our eyes. A diamond is just a rock, a rock which is the beneficiary of one of the greatest marketing schemes of all time. The diamond engagement ring was invented by De Beers, and now it's "tradition". They aren't rare; the supply is tightly controlled to keep prices high. Sometimes, disillusionment can aid in the cause of justice. Our truths can still be beautiful and cherished, even if we know how they work, even if we know their messy, human history, even if they don't have capital-T's, even if we are just...