Anti-utopia: why put the sword through someone else’s social dreaming?

Why would a writer or filmmaker go to the trouble of putting a sword through someone else’s social dreaming? This sure had me beat for the longest time. After all, those who imagined utopias were trying to imagine the world as a better place. I decided to do some digging around to find out some ways social dreaming has manifested itself in history since the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, in the decades before Huxley wrote Brave New World (1932) and Gattaca was released in 1997. I discovered that these social dreams could be considered to have sinister aspects and Huxley, along with filmmaker Andrew Niccol have serious reasons to be anti-utopian, or critical of some people’s social dreaming (Sargent).

Since the late nineteenth century, heredity, biological characteristics, and genetics have been inherent in social dreaming. I’ll begin the journey with phrenology. According to this theory, inherited external characteristics demonstrated that criminals were biologically inferior to law abiding people. It was thought that different faculties or departments of the brain each controlled a unique form of behaviour; enlarged or unusually undersized brain sections produced bumps or depressions in the skull. As a result, a physical examination by any 'doctor' could analyse someone's skull to find reasons for problematic behaviour (Greek). This theory ignores any social influence on a person’s behaviour and discriminates unfairly against those with lumpy heads!

Closely related to phrenology was the study of eugenics (Greek). Yale alum Irving Fisher, one of America’s greatest economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was an advocate of eugenics, or carefully controlled breeding with the aim of improving human populations. That actually meant “white Northern European population...discourag[ing] all others.” Eugenics was promoted in popular culture in terms of the positive benefits of careful breeding as society would become more productive save money. How? The poor, prostitutes, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, and the criminal would be bred out of existence. Eugenics had all the prestige of Fisher and his associates on the Yale faculty behind it. Many aspects of its philosophy found its way into U.S. state law and influenced political movements internationally, such as Hitler and his National Socialism (Conniff).

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One such example of these state laws that recently came to light in Virginia is that of E. Lewis Reynolds. As a boy, Reynolds was hit in the head with a rock by a cousin. The incident nearly killed him and it triggered epileptic-like convulsions that lingered for some years. This did not prevent Reynolds from enlisting in the Marine Corp and serving his country during a 30-year military career that included tours in Korea and Vietnam. However, it was enough to classify the teenaged Reynolds as a “defective person” and he was compulsorily sterilized under a 1924 Virginia law that served as a model for other states and “even in Nazi Germany.” This gives us some indication of the way this philosophy came to be enforced on “mostly poor, uneducated men and women” (Kunkle).

This brings us to modern genetics. Incredibly, blood can be drawn from a pregnant woman to analyze the DNA of her unborn child (Kolata). The benefits of this, such as women being able to learn about their fetus and act on the information, of course, come with unintended consequences. These consequences include what Paul (in “Evolution”), writing in 1995, calls “subtle pressures to make the ‘right’ choice” when confronted with information about a genetically imperfect fetus. Paul (in “Evolution”)writes that “Some women may feel they have no realistic alternatives to the decision to be tested or to abort a genetically imperfect fetus.” This may be due to doctors’ fear of being sued if the child is born with a genetic disorder, “by anxiety of potential loss of health or life insurance, or by their inability to bear the enormous financial costs of caring for a severely disabled child.” This is what people generally have in mind when they characterize genetic medicine as a form of eugenics (Paul in “Evolution”).

This leads us to the human genome project. Completed in 2003, this map of the human genome has given scientists a greater understanding of cancer and rare genetic diseases (Kolata). This undeniably useful research is also tempered by the potential for this information to be abused. Employers and health insurance companies could use genetic information collected for a beneficial purpose to refuse employment or coverage of individuals. To prevent this, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which took effect in 2009, was implemented (Nuzzo).

The events and research pertaining to eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century form the backdrop against which Huxley developed his ideas and wrote Brave New World. Subsequent research in genetics through to the end of the twentieth century influenced Niccol and the ideas in his film Gattaca. Developments in the early twenty first century seem to justify their concern and I think Huxley and Niccol were right to put the sword through this kind of social dreaming.  Their work serves as a warning to us, as members of society, about how things could be applied to advantage the elite and tread on the disadvantaged; put down individualism and remove opportunities for those who have few.

To conclude:

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Works cited:

Conniff, Richard. "God and white men at Yale." Yale Alumni Magazine. Yale Alumni Mag. May/June 2012. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

"Evolution: Humans: Babies by Design." PBS. WGBH Educational Foundation and Clear Blue Sky Productions, Inc. 2001. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Gattaca. Dir. Andrew Niccol. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Gore Vidal. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1997. Film

Greek, Cecil E. Criminological Theory. The Florida State University, 2005. Web. April 19 2013.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Kolata, Gina. "Human Genome, Then and Now." New York Times 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Kunkle, Frederick. "Va. eugenics victims would receive compensation for sterilization under bill." The Washington Post Jan 30 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Nuzzo, Regina. "Genetic Profiling." CR. CR Mag. 3.5 (Fall 2008). Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Web.