Looming behind the news of every scientific breakthrough is another, subtler question: What do we do with the knowledge? Every revelation forces a reckoning: How will it change our conception of ourselves?
With the announcement earlier this week that researchers had completed a draft sequence of the human genome, we now know that humans are more closely connected to other creatures than we ever suspected. We now know that some human genes came from bacteria. We now know that a human being contains some 30,000 distinct genes, less than a third of the number scientists expected to find.
This suggests a question that science alone can’t answer: What does it mean to be human? If our gene count doesn’t distinguish us from other organisms, if we can’t point to a genetic tattoo far fancier and substantially more complicated than that of a fruit fly, then what, precisely, makes us so all-fired special?
What, that is, does being human imply? It’s a question we may be reluctant to answer, having just escaped from one of the bloodiest centuries in human history, a century during which we perfected devastatingly efficient means of self-slaughter. Sometimes, new information is not exactly welcome, because it makes us look at things we’d rather not see.
In a section of her luminous book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” (1984), Annie Dillard describes what happened in the 19th Century American West when an eye doctor arrived to perform operations to remove cataracts. People who had been blind since birth suddenly could see — and for some, it was unbearable. The world of predictable shapes disappeared, replaced by dazzling colors and confusing distances. One young patient insisted on closing her eyes and carefully feeling her way around her house. Another pleaded for the doctor to make him blind again — or else, the man threatened, he’d tear his eyes out.
The newly sighted, Dillard writes, had to come to terms with “the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable.”
Like it or not, though, there is no turning back. Great scientific achievements require an engagement with great questions. That’s why the Catholic Church was so irritated by the likes of Galileo and Copernicus: They upended comfortable certitudes and forced hard thinking. The same thing happened centuries later with the dropping of the atom bomb: Suddenly, armed with new information, we were forced to consider its ominous implications.
The late James Agee expressed this necessity with grave beauty in the essay he wrote for Time shortly after Hiroshima: “When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul.”So here we are once again, pushed and goaded by science into asking ourselves a profound question. This time, though, the question isn’t prompted by a vision of destruction, but by a vision of creation: What’s so special about being human?
There is no answer — rather, there are too many answers. Rats and bacteria do not, so far as we know, write poems. But what else? You will have your ideas. I have mine.
In a German town during World War II, a man was trying to help Jewish refugees slip beneath the Nazi net. His car, filled with Jewish children, had almost crossed the border when a Nazi officer approached. No escape was possible.
The driver looked directly at the officer and said, “Be human.”
The car was waved on through.
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