“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(Yes, I’m misusing the quote. Sue me. Almost everyone misuses it, anyway. I’m just misusing it in another way, and at least doing so knowingly. So neener neener.)
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You know those mad scientist types, the ones in the old Universal Horror movies and the like? Victor Frankenstein and his descendants?
I’m always secretly pulling for them.
They dream big, those guys. Sure, it all goes horribly wrong, but at least they dream big, unlike the small, timid, minds around them. The staggering advances we have made as a species have come because of crazy dreamers like that.
I finished up reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below a couple of days ago. It got me thinking about how we live in a time when it is becoming apparent that we — and every other living thing on this planet — are going to be paying a heavy price for some of that big daring. Our hubris, it seems, is catching up with us. It’s a time of Frankenstein. The easy, religious answer is the old canard repeated in so many movies — Man must not meddle in God’s domain. There are things Man is not meant to know. We have sinned, and now that sin is coming home to roost.
But in Frankenstein, Victor’s sin isn’t that he attempts to be God. His sin is his refusal to take responsibility for his creation (One can actually read Frankenstein, in fact, as an extended commentary on God and his lack of responsibility. Ooo, an idea for a future post).
In Robinson’s novel, that same daring, that thing that small minds might call hubris, is not just the culprit in the environmental disaster that threatens the world — it is also the potential source of salvation. Robinson’s heroes dream big, staggeringly so. They’re dangerous, like mad scientists, giddy, unwilling to accept blind constraints. But they also have a sense of responsibility towards their creations, an awareness of consequence. They are engaged creatively in the realm of ethics every bit as much as in the realm of science.
