Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [7]
The French anthropologist Bruno Latour has some interesting thoughts on the matter. According to Latour, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a cautionary tale against hubris, but rather a cautionary tale against irrational fears of imperfection. Dr. Frankenstein is an antihero not because he created life, but rather because he fled in horror when he mistook his creation for a monster — a self-fulfilling prophecy. The moral of the story, where saving the planet is concerned, is that we should treat our technological creations as we would treat our children, with care and love, lest our abandonment of them turn them into monsters.
“The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature,” Latour writes, “but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment.” In other words, the term “ecological hubris” should not be used to describe the human desire to remake the world, but rather the faith that we can end the cycle of creation and destruction. /
— This essay was originally published in Orion Magazine, September/October 2011.
LOVE YOUR MONSTERS
Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children
Bruno Latour
In the summer of 1816, a young British woman by the name of Mary Godwin and her boyfriend Percy Shelley went to visit Lord Byron in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. They had planned to spend much of the summer outdoors, but the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year had changed the climate of Europe. The weather was so bad that they spent most of their time indoors, discussing the latest popular writings on science and the supernatural.
After reading a book of German ghost stories, somebody suggested they each write their own. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, came up with the idea for The Vampyre, published in 1819,1 which was the first of the “vampire-as-seducer” novels. Godwin’s story came to her in a dream, during which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”2 Soon after that fateful summer, Godwin and Shelley married, and in 1818, Mary Shelley’s horror story was published under the title, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus.3
Frankenstein lives on in the popular imagination as a cautionary tale against technology. We use the monster as an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature. When we fear genetically modified foods we call them “frankenfoods” and “frankenfish.” It is telling that even as we warn against such hybrids, we confuse the monster with its creator. We now mostly refer to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster as Frankenstein. And just as we have forgotten that Frankenstein was the man, not the monster, we have also forgotten Frankenstein’s real sin.
Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not born a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life. “Remember, I am thy creature,” the monster protests, “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed… I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
Written at the dawn of the great technological revolutions that would define the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankenstein foresees that the gigantic sins that were to be committed would hide a much greater sin. It is not the case that we have failed to care for Creation, but that we have failed to care for our technological creations. We confuse the monster for its creator and blame our sins against Nature upon our creations. But our sin is not that we created technologies but that we failed to love and care for them. It is as if we decided that we were unable to follow through with the education of our children.4
Let Dr. Frankenstein’s sin serve as a parable for