Science and Fates Worse Than Death. by risa
Kurt Vonnegut wrote many of my favorite novels. When I was twelve or thirteen I wrote him a letter in which I remember mentionning that he would probably make a great high school teacher, and that I wished he was a teacher at my school. He never responded, but then he was probably very busy being great. He’s come up in conversation a few times recently, so I thought I’d share an excerpt from one of his books of speeches called Fates Worse Than Death, in which he proposes a very practical scheme for helping scientists to not be evil. He also makes several of his classic, tragic, near-hysterical type jokes that make you laugh and also want to put your arms around him and tell him, it’s ok. The world is still mad, people are still blowing each other up horrifyingly well, and trying to make space shields out of bombs and lasers, but on some days, in some places of the world, some things are still ok, OK?
“Hitler dreamed of killing Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mental defectives, believers in democracy, and so on, in industrial quantities. It would have remained only a dream if it hadn’t been for chemists as well educated as my brother, who supplied Hitler’s executionners with the cyanide gas known as Cyklon-B. It would have remained only a dream if architects and engineers as capable as my father and grandfather hadn’t designed extermination camps- the fences, the towers, the barracks, the railroad sidings, and the gas chamber and crematoria- for maximum ease of operation and efficiency. I recently visited two of those camps in Poland, Auschwitz and Bikenau. They are technologically perfect. There is only one grade I could give their designers, and that grade is A-plus. They surely solved all the problems set out for them.
“Yes, and that is the grade I would have to give to the technicians who have had a hand in the creation of car bombs which are now exploding regularly in front of embassies and department stores and movie theatres and houses of worship of every kind. They surely solve the problems set out for them. Kablooey! A-plus! A-plus!
“Which brings us to the differences between men and women.
Feminsts have won a few modest successesin the United States during the past few decades, so it has become almost obligatory to say that the differences between the two sexes have been exaggerated. But this much is clear to me: Generally speaking, women don’t like immoral technology nearly as much as men do. This could be the result of some hormone deficiency. Whatever the reason, women, often taking their children with them, tend to outnumber men in demonstrations against schemes and devices which can kill people. In fact, the most effective doubter of the benefits of unbridled technological advancement so far was a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who died 134 years ago. She, of course, created the idea of the Monster of Frankenstein.
“And to show you how fruity, how feminine I have become in late middle age: If I were the President of MIT, I would hang pictures of Boris Karloff as the Monster of Frankenstein all over the institution. WHy? To remind students and faculty that humanity now cowers in living dread, expecting to be killed sooner or later by Monsters of Frankenstein. Such killing goes on right now, by the way, in many other parts of the world, often with our sponsorship- hour after hour, day after day.
“What should be done? You here at MIT should set an example for your colleagues everywhere by writing and then taking an oath based on the Hippocratic Oath, by which medical doctors have been bound for twenty-four centuries. Do I mean to say that no physician in all that time has violated that oath? Certainly not. But every doctor who has violated it has been correctly branded a scumbag. And why has the late Josef Mengele become the most monstrous of all the Nazis, in the opinion of most of us? He was a doctor, and he gleefully violated the Hippocratic Oath.
“If some of you were to act on my suggestion, to write a new oath, you will of course have to examine the original, which is conventionally dated 460 years before the birth of Christ. So it is a musty old Greek document, much of it irrelevant to a physician’s moral dilemmas in the present day. It is also a perfectly human document. No one has ever suggested that it came from god in a vision or on clay tablets found on a mountain top. A person or some people wrote it, inspired by nothing more than their own wishes to help rather then harn humankind. I assume that most of you, too, would rather help than harm humankind, and might welcome formal restraints on what a wicked boss might expect of you.
(…)
“Your paraphrase might go like this: ‘The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of all life on this planet, according to my own ability and judgment, and not for its hurt or for any wrong. I will create no deadly substance or device, though it be asked of me, nor will I council such.’
“That might make a good beginning for an oath everyone would gladly take upon graduation from MIT. And there is surely more than that you would gladly swear to. You could take it from there.
“I thank you for your attention.”
(…)
“Before my great speech to the MIT students I talked to some of them about Star Wars, Ronald Reagan’s belief that laser beams and satellites and flypaper and who-knows-what could be linked together in such a way to form an invisible dome no enemy missile could penetrate. They didn’t think there was any way it could be made to operate, but they all wanted to work on it anyway. (Why not make Caligula’s horse a Consul?)”
Here is one reason why I love America: Vonnegut in the street.
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