Positive Liberty

Lenka at Farkleberries has a post up about a doctor who wants to clone dead human beings. She expresses her disapproval and strongly articulates many of the commonly-held fears about human cloning.

And yet frankly I’m puzzled, because I share absolutely none of these fears. I have a deep respect for Lenka as a writer and a blogger, but I have to disagree with her here: I can’t for the life of me understand why people fear cloning so much. I almost feel embarrassed about it, as though I were the only clod who was so insensitive as to see nothing wrong with the idea. Lenka writes,

I think it’s a really, really bad idea, socially and psychologically, both for cloned individuals and for their families. The hubris of attempting human cloning will only prove we can duplicate bodies; we will never be able to duplicate personalities and souls, and this will be a never-ending source of disappointment and pain for all involved.

I think it would be hubris only if someone sincerely claimed that they really could duplicate a soul. But does anyone ever make this claim in real life? You can find it in science fiction, but I’ve never once seen anyone propose it seriously. Is this a genuine belief–or is it merely something that we believe people believe?

Since I do not have any expectations about duplicating the soul, I would not at all be disappointed by clones who turned out to be unique. The only disappointed people would be the ones who expected some kind of death-defying magic–And frankly, they quite deserve to be disappointed.

While many believe it wrong to make a clone – a sequential twin – of a living person, at least the families of the cloned and clon-ee should instinctively realize that the two individuals do not share the same psychology or “internal state” and are not the same individual occupying two (or more) bodies. On the other hand, cloning the dead involves more pitiful and heartrending motivations than cloning the living.

If anything, cloning the dead should be far less stressful. After all, one of the interested parties has already gone to his eternal rest. And we can’t take seriously the notion that by virtue of genetics, the clone would have a hotline to the soul of the deceased–nor even a memory of a life that had ended before he was born.

Do people who get transplanted organs suddenly have the memories of the donor? Then why should transplanting a single fertilized ovum be any different? If anything, the amount of flesh transferred is much, much less.

Perhaps my own belief system gets in the way of the fears that everyone else seems to have. I am an atheist, and outright atheists are quite rare. I believe that the soul is mortal. I consider the soul a kind of continuous relationship among the parts of the body–a melody, if you will. When the body dies, the melody ends, for the instrument on which it was played has ceased to exist.

The instrument of the body is far more than the individual’s genetic code: All of us are conditioned–tuned, as it were–by our life experiences. Each tuning is always unique, and each melody is both irreplaceable and completely unlike any other. My own unique body is the only instrument that could ever hope to play the melody of my soul. No other body even has a chance.

As another example, a good stout pair of leather gloves is all that you need for cloning a raspberry bush. You simply pull up the plant’s runners and put them down somewhere else. Treat them well, and in late summer the new plants grow an abundant crop of fresh, sweet, juicy raspberries. Every raspberry is unique and wonderful; each one has is its own telos, its own magnificent stab at perfection. Never would I ask myself whether the raspberries I ate with breakfast this morning were somehow less than fully real, or whether, in some mystical sense, I had only managed to consume one of them.

[Raspberries growing in the author's garden this morning.]

And for me at least, humans are made of exactly the same stuff as raspberries.

Going from the metaphorical to the metaphysical, I cannot see how the prevailing religious beliefs of this country could encourage the fear of cloning either. Christianity proposes that at the moment of death, each individual’s soul goes directly to Judgment. The soul then spends the rest of eternity either in Heaven or Hell, with perhaps a slight detour in Purgatory. Strictly speaking, there isn’t much room to roam.

Only Jesus Christ is thought capable of changing a soul’s ultimate destination. He only did it once, and it came at the cost of his mortal life. Surely our poor efforts aren’t enough to so radically alter the cosmic plan.

Or perhaps our test tubes are enough to fool old Jehovah after all? What poor Christians they must be, to think such things! On the contrary, we must presume that every clone is absolutely and fully human in the Christian sense as well–and televangelists should be able to solicit the cloned human beings just like the rest of us.

If Dr. Zavos succeeds, he will have made the identical embryos (and bodies) of 11-year old Cady, or of the unidentified 33-year old man whose DNA he has salvaged.

But no! He will not have created the same bodies. The genetic code may be the same, but the life experiences and environments will be entirely different. The new instruments will have received a different tuning, and they will play an entirely different melody.

The clones will not be those people.

Exactly. And I’m coming to suspect that the fear of cloning owes a great deal to certain uncanny doubts and fears surrounding the immortality of the soul. Cloning brings “the same soul” and “a different soul” uncomfortably close to actually being one another, particularly given that most people aren’t quite settled about the nature of the soul to begin with.

And yet we have no such squeamishness about twins. We don’t expect twins to have telepathic powers; we don’t expect each twin to have but half a soul; we never think that when one twin dies, the survivor somehow inherits the memories of the deceased. It’s a bunch of mystical humbug to think that clones made in test tubes would be any more supernaturally gifted than the clones already among us.

Yet, how will the families be able to extricate their hopes, fears, history and expectations of their deceased loved ones from these new bodies their DNA has generated? Clones will have none of their genetic forebears’ memories, thoughts, or experiences, yet the families will see a familiar face and expect a stopped life to restart, and the past to reveal itself, like some bizarre living recording.

“But…[he/she] used to love playing chess and singing…don’t you remember the time we all went to…oh, no. I guess you wouldn’t remember.”

That, to me, is one of the core tragedies of human cloning… what Dr. Zavos is trying to do is an affront to the living and a disservice to the memory of the dead.

I find nothing tragic at all about creating a living human memorial to another individual. On the contrary, we already do it all the time: It’s called having children, and there is nothing wrong with it, provided that the parents know when to let the children become independent individuals of their own. Children are both monuments to their parents and unique individual creations. One day, perhaps clones will come to be regarded as children of their originals, with all the same expectations that we have for the rest of humanity’s children. Certainly this seems more reasonable than the fears that we have been discussing.

What’s tragic about all of this is not that clones will be unique human individuals. What’s tragic is that a bunch of superstitions and prejudices are sabotaging the life of any potential clone even before he’s born. Clones will be children–no more and no less. They will be children precisely like their genetic parent was once a child. I hope for their sake that we get over our squeamishness before they are old enough to be hurt by it.

And come to think of it, didn’t western society have just this same discussion back when in vitro fertilization first appeared? I am just barely old enough to recall being made fun of in elementary school for supposedly being a test-tube baby; I suspect that they said it to all the weirdest kids. As it happens, I wasn’t a test-tube baby, but I kind of wish that I was. Being able to see my past lives would be wicked cool.

[In fairness, I should note that there are considerable practical problems with human cloning. Given that many cloned mammals have a high incidence of birth defects, it would be unconscionable to clone human beings--and difficult to imagine a fully ethical set of experiments to demonstrate that cloned humans would develop normally. These fears, though, are quite unrelated to the metaphysical or psychological concerns I have discussed above. I hesitated even to mention them, because fears have a way of bleeding irrationally from one subject to the next. But given the present state of the technology, a discussion of cloning would not be complete without discussing the technical issues that still stand in the way.]