Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [174]
For over fifty years, the Cold War dominated our lives like storm clouds, and communism was blamed for most of the evils of the world. Now that the Cold War is over, the world is fragmenting and ethnic warfare has erupted everywhere, including the streets of the United States, where poverty, murder, violence and injustice are endemic. Our preoccupation with communism camouflaged a rottenness within the political and economic system of which we were so proud. There has been an illusion throughout history that when man made “progress,” advancing technology would help him to communicate better so that the barriers of conflict and misunderstanding between us would crumble. But now that we have satellite dishes, global coverage by CNN, interactive TV, instant telecommunications, the most sophisticated equipment and the forensic wisdom of the Rand Corporation, our situation is worse than ever.
Whatever grains of optimism survive in me about the evolution of mankind are centered in the belief that genetic alteration, however fraught with danger, is the only possible solution to what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil. I don’t think anything in the range of human existence since Neanderthal man—not fire or the invention of weapons or the wheel—equals in importance Francis Crick and James Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA. It will have an incalculable effect on society, religion and our concept of ourselves. Within a few years, scientists will finish mapping the human genome based on Crick and Watson’s discovery, and with it will come an opportunity to alter the nature of man. Already scientists are beginning to unravel the sources of the neural disorders that produce anger and frustration, the will to kill and the hostility that produces war. They have already linked some genetic defects to certain kinds of aggressive and violent behavior; they are starting to make extraordinary advances in biogenetics and neurogenetics, opening doors that will lead to a clearer understanding not only of how genes affect our behavior, but how to alter that behavior. In the science of behavioral genetics, we’re on the cusp of enormous change. The time is approaching when the genes of a chimpanzee can be altered to give him the gift of speech. Genetic engineering of human behavior will advance on a parallel track. If the human race has a genetic fault that causes errant behavior or self-destruction, it will simply be removed.
A fantasy, you say? I think it is inevitable—and necessarily so if our species is ever to stop killing its own kind.
Of course there will be an uproar in the churches when scientists have the power to engineer human beings. It will be argued that the design of human beings is God’s province alone. There may even be enough resistance to advancing the science of behavioral genetics to halt temporarily what is doable, but whenever something is possible, sooner or later it will be done. The world has always been in a state of revolution between the old and the new, and new discoveries are unstoppable. The twenty-first century will produce a far bigger revolution in the biological sciences than the twentieth century did in the physical sciences. It has taken me seventy years to refrain from doing certain things that were destructive to me and to other people, and to resolve emotional conflicts that produced errant social behavior. With genetic implants I probably would not have been burdened with the emotional disorders that caused me to spend most of my life in emotional disarray. In the future, specialists will recognize the kind of trouble I had as a child and be able to do something about it.
If I had been loved and cared